Icons and Icons: New Paradigms In Interface Design

Abstract

The use of icons in the visual communication of computer languages has recently increased in quantity and complexity with the widespread proliferation of icons in mobile dispositives such as smart phones, ipads, etc. Icon designers and analysts, however, seem to underestimate the semiotic and rhetorical implications in the representation of icons, the subsumed syntax leading to easy or difficult dialogue in iconic communication, the need for an architectural representation of iconic contents. I shall analyse terminological phallacies and conceptual limitations of present interpretations in icons usability and provide a possible further interpretation on the basis of semiotic, linguistic, rhetorical assumptions and related syntax. In particular I shall propose a syntactic interpretation based on the relation between metaphors and metonymies in iconic representation needed to validate the results of comprehension tests

Keywords

• metonymic and metaphoric icons, semiotic and rhetorical interface design, iconic

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