Rene Rivera wrote:
[...] Well this is where I'll likely put my design foot down :-) Icons serve the purpose of stand ins for a corresponding text. In this case the icons are stand ins for the headings. Icons loose their effectiveness if you have the equivalent text near it. This is the stand in usefulness not the visual interest usefulness, although it also looses some of that because of the distraction that the text becomes. [...]
I disagree with your claims about text vs. icons. I'm using Thunderbird right now to compose messages, and I very much like that it has text captions for all the big icon buttons. Firefox does not display text under the buttons, which makes the buttons smaller, but also perhaps less useful. I think Dave makes a good point about universally recognized symbols vs. new conventions. When I see your toolbox icon, I do not think "newsgroups" or "communication" or "particpation". I think "tools", and I expect to see links to perhaps Boost.Build or BJam or CVS clients or compiler tools. I would think that a page icon with text on it would convey the mailing list/newsgroups more clearly. I didn't even see the text the first time around, which is why I asked for it to be added. I only found the text headings when I realized that other people were seeing them there. Perhaps that is food for thought. Having said all that, I appreciate the work you put into it, and am glad that somebody is doing it! Dave