Whenever your visitor wants to know about the author of the article, he seeks for the author information around your article post. The author image icon easily grabs the visitors eye. Later the visitor reads the preceding text if he finds it necessary. What made easy for your web page visitor is that, they easily can find the thing whatever they are searching for.
One may want to know the author or the date when article was posted. Typing only "Posted on August 14, 2010" doesn't helps. Because web page already contains lots of text in it and no body will be able to notice the date written without any highlight. To focus it you can use small icons just before the date.
You can compare what role and icon plays with the image shown below. The date is focused and noticable because of a clock icon present just right side of the date.
While no use of icons make it less noticeable and hidden between the crowd of texts.
Same thing goes for the author of the post, label of the post and category of the post, which are not always needed by visitors but when some body needs it then it is right there just after the icon denoting it.
There are thousands of icon galleries found on web, it is not necessary to design your own 16X16 icons. You can see various icon sets found on net, here is one of them listed by Smashing Magazine. Or incase you need your own design, just open up your favorite image editor, make a new file with desired resolution. 16X16 pixels is very common resolution for making icons. There you go, draw your icon right there.
Now the question may arise, which format is most preferred? The choice is yours, most of the time I use PNG as in my previous post, GIF images are being replaced by PNG images. However there is no harm in using GIF images for small non-animated icons. And more thing, using animated icons is not recommend for a good web design.
Nice! Without these icons, it looks odd and unprofessional blog. So, I also added some small icons on some place of my blog.
ReplyDeleteI have used PNG format. Thanks for sharing :)