newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Saturday, July 25, 2026
My first pixel art
Katrina Evans has started a pixel club based on little windows. I’m an old dog willing to learn new tricks so I headed over to Piskel and gave it a shot using one of Katrina’s window templates.
I decided to acknowledge wildfire season with a sunrise in the smoke. An orange orb in the grey was an easy start for a beginner.
More often, I have a nice view of rivers, mountains and clear blue skies. If I get better at pixel art, I’ll try to show those instead.
Edit: Katrina warned me they can be addictive, and sure enough I now have an animated gif of the Newsonaut rocket taking off.
More posts in the Design category
Tuesday, July 7, 2026
A design trap at the playground
A design trap is when you start off with what seems like a good idea, then cling to it even when it obviously isn’t working.
It appears that happened with this sign. I have obscured the name of the local body that made it because they had good intentions.
The sign prohibits four things:
- Smoking
- Alcohol
- Drugs
- Loitering
For smoking, they used the internationally recognized symbol of a circle with a slash through it and a cigarette in the middle.
So far, so good. So good, in fact, that it seemed like the perfect way to express other bans. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a slippery slope.
For alcohol, things got tricky because alcohol mainly comes in bottles and cans, which in pictogram form would not necessarily be recognized as containing alcohol.
So they chose a martini glass, complete with olive. Outside of James Bond movies, I’m pretty sure I have never seen a martini glass. Maybe I need to get out more. Still, the thought of miscreants sipping martinis on a playground seems silly.
They were forced to use the martini glass, though, because they were in a design trap. They needed something to go inside a slash-circle and a martini glass was all they could find that unambiguously says “alcohol.”
Then came drugs, which are even trickier. A syringe might have been a good choice, but a syringe is not always used for illicit drugs. The same holds true for pills. A marijuana cigarette would have looked too much like a tobacco cigarette.
So they settled on the word “DRUGS”. But making matters worse, they had to place the word on top of the slash because otherwise it would have obscured the letters. We know what they meant, but technically an item is not banned unless the slash goes through it.
Finally we get to “No Loitering.” This is the point where they should have had an “aha” moment. The words tell you everything you need to know, simple and direct.
This is the moment when they should have broken out of the design trap, and realized they had a simple solution. All they had to do was use their words: no smoking, no alcohol, no drugs, no loitering.
To be fair, they likely got their slash-circle ideas from the internet, where a similar design trap is apparent. If you do an image search on “no alcohol”, you’ll find martini glasses, wine glasses, wine bottles, and more. A search on “no drugs” reveals a similar hodge-podge.
The representations of “no loitering” are especially weird. What exactly are those stick figures supposed to be doing?
More posts in the Design category
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
The search symbol that needs only seven characters
Back in the day, reporters would record their phone interviews by attaching a suction cup to the back of the earpiece part of the handset. It was attached by wire to a machine that did the recording.
There was a time when their use was widespread enough to warrant their own unicode. This consisted of circle with a stem coming out of the bottom left.
Does that remind you of anything? How about a magnifying glass?
The near-universal symbol for search is a magnifying glass. Granted, that symbol usually has the stem coming out the bottom right, but still — the resemblance is uncanny.
Unicode for telephone recorder: ⌕
Font Awesome SVG for magnifying glass:
That SVG from Font Awesome looks pretty good, but it uses hundreds of characters as opposed to seven for the unicode. And do you really want a third-party dependency just for a magnifying glass?
Unicode code
⌕Font Awesome code
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 640 640" width="21" height="21"><!--!Font Awesome Free v7.3.0 by @fontawesome - https://fontawesome.com License - https://fontawesome.com/license/free Copyright 2026 Fonticons, Inc.-->
<path d="M480 272C480 317.9 465.1 360.3 440 394.7L566.6 521.4C579.1 533.9 579.1 554.2 566.6 566.7C554.1 579.2 533.8 579.2 521.3 566.7L394.7 440C360.3 465.1 317.9 480 272 480C157.1 480 64 386.9 64 272C64 157.1 157.1 64 272 64C386.9 64 480 157.1 480 272zM272 416C351.5 416 416 351.5 416 272C416 192.5 351.5 128 272 128C192.5 128 128 192.5 128 272C128 351.5 192.5 416 272 416z" />
</svg>You don’t have to stop there. Unicode has over 100,000 symbols to choose from. If you just need a few items for your blog, this is the way to go.
(Yes, I know about the emojis 🔍 (🔍) and 🔎 (🔎), but they don’t even look good in a retro way.)
More posts in the Design category
Thursday, October 22, 2020
Top 10 reasons people hate forms
1. Repetitive: You’ve filled in the same information on a gazillion other forms.
2. Unnecessary: The form is a sneaky way of generating sales leads. “You want this ‘free’ thing? You have to give me your email.”
3. Privacy: The form asks for personal information that is none of their business.
4. Long: Not just long, but all the fields are required so you can’t skip them.
5. Security: The form asks you to give up your email for the bazillionth time. Eventually something will go wrong and you’ll wind up the victim of ransomware, or who knows what.
6. Password: The form asks you to create a password, but you’ve created a zillion passwords in other forms, so you have to think of a new one because you’ve been told they should all be unique. And then you have to have a system for remembering all the passwords.
7. Unclear questions: The form asks you to do something, but you’re not sure what it means, so you have to search their site for an answer, or find a way of getting in touch with support.
8. Dishonest: The form tries to trick you into buying stuff you don’t want or subscribing to an email newsletter you don’t want.
9. Doesn’t work: After filling it in, the form doesn’t do anything, so you’ve wasted your time.
10. Unnatural: When you buy something from a bricks-and-mortar store you don’t have to fill in a form. Why should you have to do this when buying something online?
More posts in the Design category
