A Study of the Illustrative Style Effect of Icon Design - Using the Digital Camera Icon as an Example

Three main questions are addressed in this study: (a) how do different icon design conditions (illustrative styles and design elements) and colours affect consumers’ Kansei? (b) how do different design conditions and colours match with the icon image? and (c) what kind of design conditions and colours would generate positive influences on the icon image? To address these questions, the design conditions of icons as visual illustrative styles were defined, including “shadow style”, “perspective style”, “emboss style” and “frame style”. Three design elements were also arranged for each illustrative style, and a series of new icon samples were generated through Orthogonal Design. In addition, the new icon samples were assorted with the following colours, Red, Orange, Yellow, Yellow-Green, Green, Cyan, Blue, Purple, and were re-designed into on-line question naires. Subjects were asked to complete an icon image evaluation. Finally, the evaluation results were analyzed using Conjoint analysis and Neural networks. The RMSs of all the NN-based models and CA models are very small and the predicting performance of NN-based models and CA models are equally good.