: How would you represent "changes" in an icon? I've come across a challenge. I need to design an icon representing "changes". Well actually two closely related icons, both representing "changes"

@Rivera951

for #1 , look at what MS Word uses for their track changes icon for inspiration.

for #2 , think of it in terms of "What's New?" rather than "what happened while I was away?"

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@Sherry646

The ability to change something I would translate it to edit, and make an edit icon, with a pencil or something like that, or 2 overlapping arrows like when you want to shuffle a song in your player

What happened when you where away is actually see changes , view mode, and inactive action, so I would use an eye or a loader or something like that.

Now in order to make them related you can use for both of them the same"base icon"
and change the icon underneath, like in facebook when you have a new notification you have the world icon as the "base icon" and the number of notification is the changing icon on the right bottom of it

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@LarsenBagley460

Don't think about the abstract concept of "changes" - base it on what will catch the eye of someone looking for this exact feature.

So think about what, in the context of your application, is most distinctive, unique or visual about this feature from the user's point of view.

It'll depend on the application, but if, for example, the "changes" panel is only place in your application where you see strikethrough text next to new text, you could use:



Or maybe its key characteristic is some particular type of list? Then use a variant of a list icon. etc etc

And test it, even if the best test you can do is finding a few people slightly but not very familiar with the application and asking them "what do you think these buttons do" or "where would you look to see changes?".

....

Then some variant on that mixed with icons you use to represent time, user profiles, etc (depending on which is most relevant to when you expect the "since you been gone" icon to actually be used)

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