We had a conversation the other day about how the concept of an icon that says
"change language" was a . . . formidable . . . design challenge. I mentioned
that I'd brought this up to the Design Guild a few months back, and we spent several
hours talking about it.
They had some far-out concepts. But the end boiled down to something like this:
Obviously, this is something I threw together in about 20 minutes. I pulled glyphs from
the WP logo for it; the proportions are way off, and i don't know that it's going
to work below 32 pixels.
Here's the thinking:
Indicating *languages* is next to impossible.
Indicating *scripts* is less so.
People will be more likely to recognize foreign scripts than foreign language names
(e.g., if you don't speak a Latin script, "English", "Deutsch",
and "Italiano" are going to look the same to you).
Opposition research showed that most of the more intelligent switchers depend on
script-recognition than actual word recognition.
Thoughts? I'm eager to think about this because I'm working on the
"Wikipedia 2015" designs, and it's important to have a handle on this for
them.
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Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
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