Personal Agenda Icons

CREATING YOUR OWN ORGANIZER SYMBOLS FOR YOUR PHONE

for Calendar, Tasks and Contact categories

Your smartphone may not give you the opportunity of making your own agenda icons. If it does they will be seriously tiny, for instance to show in the Week or even Month view on your phone.

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If you are viewing this page on a desktop or laptop monitor the icons above will look ridiculously small. They were made for an early version of Pocket PC Agenda Fusion, which allowed only 10 x 9 pixels, or 20 by 18 max. Smartphones come in much higher resolution now, but even this diminutive size can be useful when you're grabbing a glance at your calendar on a tiny screen.

These minute computer images are just for your personal use, so if you have a go at making a few, you can learn from your mistakes without any busybodies making uncalled-for remarks. You'll soon discover what works in an icon and what does not.

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

You can start by adapting the sample icon sets that sometimes come with agenda apps.

I could even have used simple coloured squares to represent the categories. They would 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 have no 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.

icon tree

You may think my tree icon looks like a leaf.

(If you can see it.)

Luckily that doesn't matter.

In the world of symbols, either a tree or a leaf can stand for a tree!

Besides, as long as you know what your agenda icon means, all is well in a sunny world. For Private sections, it may even be an advantage to have symbols that only you can understand.

MAKING AGENDA ICONS

CREATING YOUR OWN ORGANIZER SYMBOLS FOR YOUR PHONE

for Calendar, Tasks and Contact categories

Make your own personal agenda icons for your phone