Good article, though he makes it sound as if there is an actual optimal amount of detail that you can put into an icon, while in fact it's very dependent on the context.<p>For example the right-most "house" icon looks very housey to me, because I could gather from the line of icons that it was supposed to depict a house.<p>When building interfaces it's funny (or not, depending on the pressure) to find that users interpret the icons in completely novel ways. For example: trash cans are interpreted as brushes because someone expects the paste button at that position.