[ubuntu-art] Apport icons -- merely some ideas

[Donn]

Hi,
Thanks for your great feedback.
> I've tried the icon on my boyfriend, and he was totally clueless; he
> offered possibilities such as "notepad", or "drawing", but he did not
> guess what the bug meant in the first place. It is not a statistically
> meaningful experiment, but he's an architect used to computers --
> *windows* computers, unfortunately ;-).
You are correct, for example I cannot imagine what someone in Thailand thinks 
of a 'bug' or someone in Sweden, etc. I was basing it on my point of view and 
also on the computer "culture" where there are several memes 
like "bugs", "windows", "cursors" and so on, however you are quite correct 
that they are all English words. It's amazing, to me, to hear about the 
word "fallos" -- I made the automatic assumption that a picture of a bug 
would translate in anyone's mind into the same meme.

Wow, what to do ...?

How would we universally express the concept of "program error report"?

Perhaps we would find that it is not possible. I have argued before (it might 
have been this list) that all artwork should be based on the *locale*. This 
makes the task much larger, icons for everything would have to be 
independently created for every language, but I think it could be faced, and 
made quite efficient -- perhaps only a small percentage of icons will end-up 
being confusing, like my "bug" icon was.

<mad idea>
Perhaps a website could be started where people could "vote" for their 
favourite icons in each locale. We would present whatever icons we have now, 
and whatever new ones artists want to quickly sketch. The idea would be to 
see which symbols represent which concepts in the minds of the audiences of 
each language. We could have categories (translated, natch) in each locale 
with concepts like:
"file", "folder", "mouse", "open", "close", "new", "delete", "create", "error", "mail" 
and so on -- covering the basic verb/noun ground of what computers and 
application let us do. After that we can realistically begin to produce icons 
that actually speak to the people who will use them.
</mad idea>

> Again, I insist that the icons are very well done and I do find them cute.
And thanks for your input.

Donn

-- 
Once you start believing in things for which there's no evidence, where do you 
stop?
-- Sackett http://forums.randi.org