I have previously discussed that stories in nleyten will be categorised under two distinct, orthogonal attributes: a section and a topic (well, in truth the 'topic' attribute is now better called 'tags', but about that I'll talk some other time). As it stands, there will be nine distinct sections, as follows:

• news
• articles
• op-eds
• reviews
• fiction
• interviews
• forum
• features
• journals

Now, it is a long and established tradition to have a little icon next to the blurb introducing each story. Slashdot does it, kuro5hin does it, and so do most similar sites. It makes the page livelier and provides for an immediate visual identification of the story's contents. Nevertheless, I believe that Slashdot and Kuro5hin have made a mistake in associating the icon with the topic of the story. Topics are messy and far too numerous, which has made the whole icon concept lose its strength. It is mainly for this reason that in nleyten I have decided to have the icons being associated with sections rather than topics.

We have nine sections, so obviously I needed nine icons. Though there is abundant clipart available in friendly licenses, in the end I was faced with the problem of having an icon set that a) would go well together, b) would fit nicely with the design of nleyten's pages, and c) would convey the metaphors I wanted just right.

I decided to take the plunge and make the icons myself. For that I needed the appropriate software, so I have finally given Inkscape a serious look. In truth, I couldn't draw to save my life. At best I can bluff my way into drawing, but Inkscape makes it really easy to create realistic-looking icons. Here are the results for eight of the sections: (no icon for the 'features' section yet; finding the right metaphor has been hard)

The originals are SVG, so they scale perfectly. Also, the icons are shown in random order, which brings me to a little question to the audience: is the association between an icon and the section it is supposed to represent obvious? Please post comments with your guesses. And remember that there is no icon yet for 'features', so forget about that one for now. Thanks!