Friday 22 December 2017

Anachronicons 3

Telephones haven't looked like this for a long time:

Telephone icon
But if you search for a telephone emoji in a Unicode font, you're likely to find something much like that. In fact, mining for "telephone" in the Unicode character set delivers a rich seam of nostalgia:
  • TELEPHONE SIGN, U+2121
  • TELEPHONE RECORDER, U+2315
  • BLACK TELEPHONE, U+260E
  • WHITE TELEPHONE, U+260F
  • TELEPHONE LOCATION SIGN, U+2706
  • TELEPHONE RECEIVER, U+1F4DE
  • LEFT HAND TELEPHONE RECEIVER, U+1F57B
  • TELEPHONE RECEIVER WITH PAGE, U+1F57C
  • RIGHT HAND TELEPHONE RECEIVER, U+1F57D
  • WHITE TOUCHTONE TELEPHONE, U+1F57E
  • BLACK TOUCHTONE TELEPHONE, U+1F57F
And my favourite:
  • TELEPHONE ON TOP OF MODEM, U+1F580

Sunday 17 December 2017

Anachronicons 2

Here's another common anacronicon:
File Save icon
Everyone knows it's the icon to save a file; but when was the last time you saved anything to a 3.5" floppy disk?

Saturday 9 December 2017

Anachronicons 1

If you look at icons and symbols in everyday use, you'll notice something strange. A few of them use old representations of a concept in order to differentiate them from similar visual elements. I call them "anachronicons". Take, for example, the speed camera UK traffic sign from The Highway Code:
Speed Camera Traffic Sign (UK)
Everyone (in the UK, at least) knows what it means, but isn't it strange that the graphic designer used the image of a late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century camera? It's not as if the sign just hasn't been updated; cameras of this form were already defunct when speed cameras (and presumably their signs) were introduced to the UK.

Tellingly, it only seems to be the UK that uses an old-fashioned camera in this way; other countries use words, radar "waves" or images of more modern cameras.