borders on images

[The Big Glee Bopper]

On Wed, 25 Oct 1995, Karen G. Schneider wrote:

> The point should be made for those of us in or from public-service
> settings: with novice users, the opposite is often true--that people expect
> icons to function as buttons and will click on them whether or not they are
> linked.  That's my peeve with all those graphic "dots" used to bullet and
> add color to pages--novice users will click on a button and then get
> confused when it does not respond.  Sort of like what happened with the CHI
> 89 Kiosk (Salomon, 89)--walk-up users clicked on bulleted text, apparently
> because they thought these buttons were affordances mapped to a function
> suggested by the corresponding text.  These folks were not *software*
> naive, but they were new to this particular interface.   This would suggest
> that everything on a page has a purpose--either the purpose you assign and
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> successfully articulate, or the purpose the user, seeking meaning and
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> structure, reads into it.
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The _real_ point may be that a critical area of study which is not a 
traditional area for library/information studies is probably Graphic 
Design as it is taught in Fine Arts departments for the past 1000 years 
and started in caves with buffalo paintings. 

The interesting phrasing Karen used was _on a page_ not on a screen. The 
history that supports this observation is _not_ current cognitive 
psychology but folks like Tufte, Aaron Marcus, Yukio Ota, Lance Wyman, 
Arnheim, Sano & Mullet, and Tog -- practitioners of information communication, 
graphic designers.

It isn't a _text_ world any longer!! Find artists or become them.. 

--Thom