Hollow Icons are Bad

medium.com

4 points·sriharis··4 comments

The red lines indicate areas where cognitive load is occurring. Your brain traces the shapes on the first row an average of twice as much. Your eye scans the outside shape and then scans the inner line to determine if there is value in the “hollow” section.

Icons without this empty core are processed as definite and only the outer lines are processed. Depending on the outline of the shape, this happens pretty fast. No matter the shape, though, the hollow icons take more time to process.

I'd like to see an actual study to back this assertion up. The article makes an off-hand reference to something about how the brain processes the reading of words, but 1) I don't see how that maps to how the brain processes icons and 2) there's no reference cited for that either.

The author believes that brains can't comprehend an unfilled shape as a shape, and instead must effectively parse it from individual lines every time. Is it possible his brain is the problem? That is, is there some subset of people who actually do find it difficult to see unfilled images as shapes?

Seriously, again?

I'm not sure how, in his formulation, words are anything other than "hollow icons", all stroke and no fill.

The author also seems not to have thought out his argument completely; in one breath, he speaks of parsing words as shapes rather than reading individual letters, and in the next he argues that there being only 26 letters in the English alphabet makes English easier to parse than the theoretically infinite set of hollow icons. If letters don't matter to English parsing, why does it matter how many there are? If they do matter, then how is an English word significantly different from a hollow icon?

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