General Question

kneck's avatar

Is there a pattern that determines which icons in Windows (or Macs) are round, which are rectangular, and which are (the rare) triangles?

Asked by kneck (55points) March 20th, 2007
Why? Who decided to do it that way?
Observing members: 0 Composing members: 0

4 Answers

ben's avatar
I'm not sure I understand the question... In general the icon designs are made by the application designers, unless they are part of the Operating System. There are general trends among the OSes with regard to smoothness and shininess, but what do you mean about the shapes?
kneck's avatar
I mean the icon is a circle for windows media player, a circle for explorer or firefox, a square/rectangle for powerpoint or word, etc. Isn't there a pattern there? Who came up with that.
leek's avatar

I don't believe there is any sort of "pattern" to the designs you refer to. Internet Explorer and Firefox are made by two different vendors, so they (and their icons) aren't related to each other at all. Each software developer has full control on how their program's icon looks.

There is a "pattern" with each icon in the Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) as each of them retain the same design. I would assume this was done to emphasize that each of these programs are apart of a larger suite of applications.

SmartAZ's avatar

Anybody can make any icon they want. Go to http://tucows.com and you can download almost a hunnerd & fifty icon editors.

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