Ican't

The question of of icons in notification boxes came up on haiku-web the other day, and I'd thought I'd take the opportunity to address the problem the website (and the desktop) have with icon scaling. I don't mean icon sizing — making something image bigger or smaller, I mean scaling, making the design larger or smaller. Think of it like this, you wouldn't shrink a billboard to business card size and hand it out, just like you wouldn't blow up a business card and put it on along an (ugly) highway.

So, heres a look at this problem as I see it on the current homepage:

The Dev Tools and Test Images icons in Shijin are both too small for their design. Compare them with their counterparts from an unimplemented Poetica/Shijin component: the icons are a tad larger and the bug-on-folder icon was replaced with the bug alone. You don't need to whack the user on the head with "I'm a container page. I am about bugs n'such." Why not just say "I'm about bugs n'such" and ask that the user will understand when they find themselves in a container.

Usability is important, but at a certain point, you have to trust that your user isn't completely inept. You don't see packaging for "Edible Foods" or "Wearable Clothing" — we might not need "Visitable Content Container" either.

While we are on the subject of incommunicative iconography look at the non-uniform-bullet (!) for "Nightly Builds":. What is that? Why is that? If for some reason you need to use an icon to clarify a "ul li", it should not add confusion to the picture.