Re: [Design] Language Icon

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. --- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ Design mailing list Design(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design