Emoticons

An Emoticon is commonly used to convey emotion or voice inflection in text conversation and in this case we are talking about icons (images) and not the original ASCII characters like this example:

Smile : ) Frown : (

If you were to tilt your head to the left you would see this example above is representing a smile and a frown. These are the origins of image emoticons and are called ASCII Emoticons. They are still used quite frequently by lots of people today. The image emoticons are a relatively newer idea that allow flexibility for conveying more variations and subtleties in human expression. This is because the eye can detect more variations in an image compared to ASCII symbols. Plus you're less likely to get a sore neck trying to figure them out! With Image Emoticons you rarely need a complex legend of symbol meanings to figure out what someone is expressing.

How are emoticons different than other icon types ?

Out of all the other icon types discussed here, emoticons tend to be the smallest in size usually ranging from 10 x 10 to 24 x 24 pixels. Typically emoticons are .gif format although other formats are supported depending on what program you use.

Emoticons should accessorize text communication and not be a distraction. It's because of this they tend to be very small in size so they complement text.

In most cases you could probably fit 4 emoticons like these inside 1 desktop icon !!!!! That gives you some idea of how small emoticons are compared to desktop icons.


Below is an example of AIM default image emoticons. You will see the ASCII equivalents to the right of the image emoticons and to the right of those you will see the description and Keyboard shortcuts.



Here is an example chat conversation using Emoticons:

PsychoMary: Hi
PassiveBob: How are you doing ?
PsychoMary: Not good. I already told you 3 times that I don't like to chat -- remember !?!?
PassiveBob: Oh Yeah. Sorry.
PsychoMary: That's okay I started the conversation.

Note: The general icon size comparison is to give you an overall idea of "common" SIZE characteristics you might see. Sizes may vary depending on display factors, user settings, and/or application constraints. This is especially true for desktop icons. In the example the avatar "happens to be" 80 x 80 pixels because I "created it" at that size and I specified 80 x 80 in the HTML code. Would a big 100 x 100 avatar be usable ? Absolutely YES it "could" but you need to be careful to make sure the forum application or bulletin board allows that size. Most likely you would have better luck sticking to sizes like 50 x 50.

Some popular forums using avatars are hosted by sites such as Planet Half-Life, Tigerhomes Animal Sanctuary, Movieforums.com, steampowered.com and there are about a million others. For Webmasters (those developing and managing websites) PHPBB is one popular (free) forum program that's very easy to install and allows administrators the option to allow avatars to be displayed. Many of these forum or bulletin board applications have different rules regarding maximum avatar size so there is not set a standard across the board.

Example of Planet Half-Life's forum member "Beagle" who uses a 50 x 50 Beagle to display his identity