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Comment by digitalengineer | Hacker News Reader

Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm sure they were quite clear for people back then. But today? we've lost the link to the original concept. The metaphors of icons don't work.

A iOS7 example, look at the browser icons at the bottom of the screen, a square with an arrow on top, two squares next to each other and two squares on top of each other...

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"Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs" - and we too use ideograms every day. %, &, +, $ etc. What else are they? "we've lost the link to the original concept" - which concept? And why (I mean, what indicates that this actually happened)? "The metaphors of icons don't work" - again, since when? Why? What substantiates this claim? "A iOS7 example, look at the browser icons at the bottom of the screen, a square with an arrow on top, two squares next to each other and two squares on top of each other..." - I agree and I'm sure there are countless examples of poorly designed icons, but it doesn't invalidate the very concept of ideograms. Just like the existence of milions of incomprehensible error messages doesn't really undermine the value of an error message in itself :) It's just poor execution of an otherwise valuable method of communication

> Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Icons are not hieroglyphs, in fact the idea behind icons is the opposite. Icons trancend language and present a concept across language barriers. If you need to go to the bathroom in russia you will know which door to take thanks to an icon.

> Think of it as the Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm sure they were quite clear for people back then. But today? we've lost the link to the original concept.

Hm? Egyptian hieroglyphs are not metaphorical ideograms but part of a "true" phonetic writing system. Nothing has been lost.

If I remember what I learned in Egyptology class, this is actually not entirely true. Although pure phonetic writing was possible, in actual practice hieroglyphs were a mixed system wherein individual hieroglyphs were sometimes treated as pictograms in order to give additional contextual meaning to a phonetically spelled word.

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