

Hollow Icons are Bad - sriharis
https://medium.com/design-ux/a93647e5a44b

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stevenwei
_The red lines indicate areas where cognitive load is occurring. Your brain
traces the shapes on the first row an average of twice as much. Your eye scans
the outside shape and then scans the inner line to determine if there is value
in the “hollow” section.

Icons without this empty core are processed as definite and only the outer
lines are processed. Depending on the outline of the shape, this happens
pretty fast. No matter the shape, though, the hollow icons take more time to
process._

I'd like to see an actual study to back this assertion up. The article makes
an off-hand reference to something about how the brain processes the reading
of words, but 1) I don't see how that maps to how the brain processes icons
and 2) there's no reference cited for that either.

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CharlesW
The author believes that brains can't comprehend an unfilled shape as a shape,
and instead must effectively parse it from individual lines every time. Is it
possible his brain is the problem? That is, is there some subset of people who
actually do find it difficult to see unfilled images as shapes?

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mauricesvay
Seriously, again?

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aaronem
I'm not sure how, in his formulation, words are anything other than "hollow
icons", all stroke and no fill.

The author also seems not to have thought out his argument completely; in one
breath, he speaks of parsing words as shapes rather than reading individual
letters, and in the next he argues that there being only 26 letters in the
English alphabet makes English easier to parse than the theoretically infinite
set of hollow icons. If letters don't matter to English parsing, why does it
matter how many there are? If they _do_ matter, then how is an English word
significantly different from a hollow icon?

