Widgetopia

user's call

from Alex King's site

These are simple enough that I think you can guess what they do. I'm not sure the left/right column placer is required, but kinda nice if you have strong feelings about such matters. The font size changer is very nice indeed.

(and for those who are following, drupal explosions continue. drupal doesn't allow multi-delete, and i had a bad import where the comments were all on the wrong entries. so i deleted my mysql database and recreated it. things are not pretty right now.)

fishy

found on Beetlebrow

I suppose if you did have a fish machine, the second to last icon would be the right symbol for it. This makes all the icons, while not always traditional, intuitable: from the left, home, mail, copyright, fish machine, search.

They do break a rule that makes me crazy-- though they all look essentially alike, they all behave differently: while home is not bad, as the addition of the arrow to icon suggests a modified behavior, email opens your native email program, copyright has no click action, but shows the copyright on rollover, and the last two open dhtml widgets in the upper right hand corner. To standardize it would be simple: just make all the buttons (except home) open in the widget area. Set expectations: meet expectations.

(I'm still puzzling over the fish machine, which appears to be a slot machine of sorts. or is it merely a red herring....)

thanks, angie, for the pointer to this quirky and elegant set of site tools.

why not

found on Simplebits

Cute little intuitable icons for a essentially useless but playful function: changing the color of the site. no harm, no foul.

submit, and...

found on optionslink, part of etrade

A bit of design look over function happening here, in my mind: the submit buttons look like icons, the help icon a bit too much like the submit buttons to form a roundy-look. That said, it's a good grouping: search, quote look-up and help, along with log-out.

The way log-out is treated is particularly interesting-- in some sites log-out is a trivial activity, but on a financial trading site, it's critical that one sign out when leaving a computer. This log-out treatment has a good presence. Which raises the question, should the global help have the same prominence? But then I'll be draw into a meditation on contextual help vs. global help, and that's a whole other topic...

one icon

found on ofoto

It's probably merely my aesthetic sense is overdeveloped, but the single icon up there in the site navigation bar looks odd ot me. I kinda feel it should be all icons, or none.

All would be useful, since this site is made for heavy repeat usage, and icons are known accelerators.

note: rollover is nice-- costs nothing in code to speak of and provides a nice extra feedback mechanism.

parlez vous?

found on via michelin, only on the front page in the upper right, but not on subsequent pages....

This is how you change this site's language. The problems of using flags for language selection has been throughly discussed, and is generally a bad idea -- mostly because countries and languages do not have a 1:1 relationship (i.e. Canada is both French and English, English is both England and Canada and USA).

I'm sorry to see it here. I'm also disappointed to see it only on the front page. Two reasons
1) because of search engines, any page could be an entry page.
2) if a english-as-a-second-languager was reading it and got stuck along the way, witching to his/her native language would be difficult (or appear impossible)

auxiliary navigation

Many sites have auxiliary navigation. Apart form the core browse system, this navigation gives access to items such as accounts, wishlists and the like. They are almost always located in the upper right hand corner of the page (like amazon, for example). Expedia tucks this set under the tabs of the main navigation. They are noticeable, and the icons give them a certain tool-feeling and help distinguish them from the browse navigation.

note the classic word balloon for contact, and the ineffective sitemap icon. My Profile is particularly odd-- a face? with a suitcase? lock?

choose -----

discovered on CNN.com

what language is --------?

It actually is not particularly a troublesome blunder, since there is no button,and thus you can't submit the separator. A selection of Korean takes you to the Korean site-- but not the same page.

royal tracking

from Royal Mail (Thanks Kevin Cheng)

It's okay until we get to the drop-downs and buttons. The buttons are lined up with the drop downs as if each of them are related to the drop-down above them. They're not, so they should be set apart some other way. Clear buttons are pointless on forms that haven't been submitted. Remove it. Finally, and this is minor, but being of the Western world, I read left to right. Shouldn't the "Track" button be on the far right as if it's the last thing to do (which it usually is)? At least they made it red.

discussion tools

From Apple Discussions

These are pretty, Mac inspired icons for common discussion tasks. For the Windows users who may not know their origin:
- Logout icon is the Mac escape icon
- Preferences icon is the same icon used for System Preferences on OS X
- Profile icon is similar to Accounts icon within System Preferences
- Bookmarks icon is a more colorful version of the Safari bookmarks icon
- Check Subscriptions icon doesn't resemble any Mac icon I've seen before
- Help icon is commonly used in Mac dialogs and preference windows

They work well for Mac users but I wonder what Windows users think of them.

login, logout

from GROW

Two items of interest-- one is the iconography for log-in, log-out which I find curious, but potentially effective; an open door for log in, a closed for log out makes a certain amount of sense.

The second is the hodge-podge nature of the site tools- log-in, log-out and register go together, arguably site map and help, but experts? This is a non-content collection of navigation devices, and the little categorizer within me balks at mismatches.

configure

found on the spiderman 2 trailer

found on movable type interface

MT has had this icon for awhile. I don't know if it is orginal or not, but I'm willing to bet MT has made is obquious enough a designer though they could slap it up on the trailer without a label. I think they were wrong (needs label), but it raises an interesting question about how the blog tools-- widely used by site creators of all types-- will affect our visual language.

email this

found on a strange yahoo-entertainment tonight hybred site

looks like a cute illustration rather hastily crushed. otherwise a fine variation on the classic.

calender tools

from expedia.com. I don't know how inuitable it is, but it seems clear.