Tips and Techniques

There's lots of cool stuff you can do with icons and documents.


On the Desktop

Consider selecting a given set or style to represent work you're doing.

Use different icons for each drive or volume;  or use one icon for local volumes and other for networked volumes.

Use icons representing the contents of a document; for example, one person uses the bomb icon on any document representing a problem or dispute.

Use icons representing key themes (i.e., party icons for recreation, more serious icons for business)


In Applications

Icons are ideal for large and small bullet-lists.

If you're in a text-based document with fonts of 14pt or less, consider using the small icons.

If you're in a presentation or a multimedia project, consider using the larger icons.

You can scale up the icons (making things big and chunky) for special accents or end-of-section displays.

You can use scaled up icons with reduced contrast (using something like PhotoShop) to provide a Mac-like background texture.

Icons make spectacularly effective buttons in multimedia presentations.