InfoFoundry

• Published:November 18th, 2008
• Comments:No Comment
• Category:Information Architecture, Interface, Wordpress

Wordpress 2.7, the latest version of the popular Wordpress blogging platform is very close to being released as a stable version. One of the cool things they have decided to do with v2.7 is to add an icon set to the backend menu to marry up the heading links and visual interaction. So they held a competition between a number of designers who each designed a set of menu icons, and presented them in a jpeg format fresh of the Photoshop threshing floor. Then people voted as to what they thought was the best set – democracy in action – Beaut. The results are interesting from many perspectives, but what seems to be clear is that the imagery and what functionality was suggested by each icon seems to have been considered as most important by voters. This is because the winner and runner-up entries employ an identical visual language in what their icons are. Here’s a breakdown of how the different icons were represented:

Icons for the upcoming WP 2.7 release

You can see that the winner and runner-up have a very similar visual language, even though their styles are different.