- 08 Dec, 2025 *
The article In Defense of Text Labels by Christopher Butler is an excellent article. I have worked with designers on many, many web applications and it is amazing how many of them aren’t aware of the issues expressed here. I do understand the struggle they run into with creating icons that are good for many different screens, color blindness, logos for print, et cetera... but sometimes you just need text.
In the years past I’d create desktop applications and I would have to stress how important it is to have tooltips. These aren’t as common in web applications …
- 08 Dec, 2025 *
The article In Defense of Text Labels by Christopher Butler is an excellent article. I have worked with designers on many, many web applications and it is amazing how many of them aren’t aware of the issues expressed here. I do understand the struggle they run into with creating icons that are good for many different screens, color blindness, logos for print, et cetera... but sometimes you just need text.
In the years past I’d create desktop applications and I would have to stress how important it is to have tooltips. These aren’t as common in web applications but, my heavens, they were useful. Eventually some applications made them basically small help windows. This is just because an icon usually cannot represent the full picture of what something does. Even in hieroglyph based languages there are certain rules and common hieroglyphs. Not reusing common icons is like making up your own languages for every app and it’s exhausting for the users and clients to learn everything.
Reducing cognitive load is a great way of making your software easier and more enjoyable to use. Sometimes all it takes is a little text.