User:CFCF/sandbox/icons
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The purpose of an icon is to display an image that can be quickly or instantly identified and associated to a topic. Icons are by definition often viewed in small formats, where detail is second to semiotic accuracy and correct interpretation.
For this reason icons should be stylistically simple and allow for viewing in formats ranging from 60x60px to 250x250px. These sizes allow for use across portal icons, in sidebars and on talk-pages.
The best image formats are PNG and SVG, with SVG being vastly superior for scalable images.
Photographies make exceptionally poor choices for icons, because these are almost always distorted upon being shrunk. Photographies are also often stored in JPEG, which similarly distorts upon any resizingāand any non-photography stored as a JPEG should be uploaded in a different format.
Iconography has too long left to the purview of Commons and MediaWiki, but iconography is very important for Wikipedia.