How to make icons useful

Human use of images for purposes of communication is nothing new. Stone age artists were painting them on the walls of their caves as long as 20,000 years ago. Nor is the use of images as coding elements in formal orthographic systems anything new - that dates back at least 5,000 years. The push to "internationalize" communications media and the relatively recent development of graphic user interfaces, however, has spawned, it seems, a mad rush to abandon more highly evolved and sound-based orthographies in favor of image-based writing systems, or, in some instances, simply images. The article that follows examines the use of icons as visual labels, discusses their strengths and weaknesses, and suggest guidelines for their design and use.