CREATE YOUR OWN PERSONAL SYMBOLS

MAKING PERSONAL PDA ICONS

CREATING YOUR OWN ORGANIZER SYMBOLS

for Calendar, Tasks and Contact categories

Your phone or pda may not give you the opportunity of making your own agenda icons. If it does they'll be seriously tiny... ...usually only 10 pixels by 9, or 20 x 18 for high resolution versions. There's nothing like starting small on your computer graphics career!

These minute computer images are just for your personal use, so you can learn from your mistakes without any busybodies making uncalled-for remarks. Try out your designs in your pda organizer calendar or ToDo list. You'll soon discover what works in an icon and what doesn't.

Unlike public icons such as the comparatively large (!) favicon marketing logo, phone and pda organizer symbols don't have to be universally understood. If you care to create a blot, blob or simple square in a certain colour, as long as means something to you, that's all that matters.

You can start by adapting the sample icon sets that usually come with pda or phone agenda applications. The personal pda icons below were made for an early version of Pocket PC Agenda Fusion. They showed me at a glance what kind of activity was involved..

I could even have used simple coloured squares to represent the categories. They'd have served their purpose alongside the text, and might have looked less cluttered. Personal pda icons don't have to be fancy. (I now think the owl a bit over-elaborate.) But symbols hold a wealth of information, and these ToDo icons also had to be used in monthly calendar views, where of course you haven't got room to squeak in even a letter of text.

I tried to make my personal pda icons as representative as possible. Where there was a red car, for instance, I knew I had to go out.

---- The car was very little altered from the sample graphic supplied.

In the calendar, a house meant an appointment for a visit at home. In Calendar view, I used the red colour to indicate a scheduled appointment - as opposed to something I was free to do at any time of day.

The green tree stood for home and garden, or housework. (I live at Treetop Cottage.)

A tree symbol could have been used from the ready-made library. In fact there were two provided. However, I found a solid block of colour and bold outline easier to pick out at this tiny size.

Besides, as long as you know what your agenda symbol means, that's all that matters. For Private sections, it may even be an advantage to have symbols that only you can understand.

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Make your own personal agenda icons for your phone or pda

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