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Label Your Icons

Mary Formanek
UX Collective
Published in
14 min readMay 16, 2020

a group of diverse complex icons

NNot labeling your icons is the same as assuming that we are all fluent in ancient hieroglyphics. Are you? Can you just walk up to Cleopatra's needle and read it like you could read a children's book? Even emojis, our modern hieroglyphics don't mean the same thing to each person. If I send you an eggplant am I talking about my garden or something else? How about a goat? Am I talking about my trip to the farm or an athlete that I feel is the “greatest of all time?” How about a snake? or fire? But a smiley face is a smiley face, right? I urge you to overthink and debate that.

The Struggle Is Real.

As a designer, I feel like we are all victims to the struggle of thinking there are conventional icons that everyone knows. But after lots of user testing over the years, I have found that this cannot be further from the truth. There is no convention for icons, there's no set of icons everyone knows. there's no standard. There are no “laws” per se when it comes to what icons anyone can use for anything. Due to this, people can use whatever they want for any meaning. That's right, no one is stopping you! Go make a cat on a horse your home icon!

But that's just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to our icon struggles.

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Written by Mary Formanek

Staff Lead Product UX / UI Designer. UX Master Certified. Art Center College of Design Alum. President Emeritus of UXPA Arizona. Tik Tok: @UXwithMary

Responses (1)

What are your thoughts?

On behalf of my fellow autists, thank you so much for this. Many of us struggle to understand symbols of any sort, and icons are almost universally confusing since they are generally designed by neurotypicals for use by other NTs. I honestly prefer to have only labels, and no icons.