The icons - some comments

Marco Scheurer (marco@sentenext1.epfl.ch)
Fri, 17 Feb 95 14:59:20 +0100

Websteppers,
Sorry, I'm late, I know that the icons made by Dave are widely accepted, but here are a few comments anyway.
They look great, and I agree with what was already pointed out, that the important message is the "document" rather than the world.
I don't like the fact that they are so Americas-centric. Not because I don't like the US or anything, but I feel that this is not right. For the icons in SpiderWoman (and I don't pretend that they are any better, they were supposed to be a temporary hack until a real artist redesign them), we also used the Earth to represent html documents. Almost all the icons in SpiderWoman are currently sampled (stolen) from NEXTSTEP, and we took a part of asianet.tiff, and flipped it, to give the idea of a generic Earth, with no bias. This is the result (the book is from Webster.app):
¬
Is there anything that could be done to make the current WebStep design more "internationally correct" (sorry)? Having two views from different angles, like the old charts where continents contours weren't precisely drawn? Center these views on oceans instead of land masses? Or just one view from above the Antartic which is supposed to be an international preserve? Adding clouds like on the nice OmniWeb.app icon?
Marco