In this book, Jonathan Reeve Price explores computer icons as cultural artifacts, elegant images, and bundles of code.

He describes how these icons were originally created as part of a graphic user interface in the early days at Apple. He then reflects on how these little drawings have evolved and become ubiquitous in our culture.  

The images themselves, enlarged in these pages, are vivid graphic forms. Their functionality, name, and overtones speak to Price, and he lets us overhear his poetic response to each of 100 icons.

About the author

Author of 30 books, conceptual artist and concrete poet, Jonathan Reeve Price shows digital art and visual poems in galleries, museums, and anthologies.  

He created the first style guide for Apple's writers and designers, developed their first online help systems, and wrote documentation for AppleWorks, FileMaker, and the Mac. 

In this light-hearted study, he explores the complex powers of these tiny interactive elements that we use every day.  

Why computer icons?

Computer icons carry culture, history, and code.  

As buttons, they awaken functions deep inside the system.  As images, they evoke old technology, memes, and mysteries.  As artwork bearing their own titles, they come loaded with implications, overtones, and attitude.  

In this book, you’ll enjoy getting a new perspective on such familiar but alien objects.

Kirkus Reviews

Jonathan Reeve Price examines the deeper meanings underlying computer icons in this unconventional poetry collection. 

Combining technical insight and artistic expression, the poet focuses on 100 icons (of the available 3,000) from Google’s Material Design set, asking questions such as, “Is the image beautiful? Does the shape invite me to tap? Does the picture telegraph what the icon can do for me?”

He considers how several of the icons that we use daily are relics of the past, from an attachment’s paper clip (“reminder / Of paper pages”) to an email’s letter shape (“The stamp—how quaint!”). 

The transition from tactile to virtual and the related grief over the loss of a physical world are recurring themes in the collection. 

• “Brush” considers the “ancient tool” that “says take me in your hand, / Feel the soft bristles, dip them, and paint.” 

• Of the heart icon that users use to “favorite” online posts, he writes, “How many meanings this sign enacts. / It performs as noun, verb, and glyph.” (“Favorite”). 

• The bell, that incessant “attention parasite” that notifies users of activity, reminds the author of “the brass dinner bell that called / My grandfather in from loading hay.” (“Bell”). 

• “Reply_all” earns the label of “The most dangerous icon of all,” provoking shame that “sends you racing back, / As you replay that one unthinking click.” 

Price ends on “Ampersand,” praising that “Elegant emblem / Ornate placeholder / Connective pointer.” 

These poems are short yet thought-provoking, inviting readers to slow down and consider the meanings of the icons they mindlessly tap all day long.

Though the topic might seem at odds with poetry, Price blends the two seamlessly, as in “360,” based on the rounded arrow that allows users to rotate views on a map: “Imagination cannot show me such a tour. / This icon launches code, / Spins the Earth around its axis, / Turns a city street into a whirl, / And races like an angel around a volcano.”

Booklife in Publishers' Weekly, August 12, 2024

Interrogating the everyday digital images like shopping carts and the triangle-within-a-circle button that you click to make media play, this collection of visual poems from Price (author of The Liquid Border) offers a humanist decoding of the symbols that govern our contemporary digital world. 

In a series of 100 poems, Price extrapolates from the functional images that we may take for granted—the icons for “format paragraph,” “restore from trash,” and more from Google’s Material Design set—what significance, resonance, and vibrations that he can, while exploring what it means to click on them and allow “a more powerful intelligence” than ours to “act on our behalf.” 

The poet describes, in an introduction, his history at Apple creating the first style guide for virtual icons, works that he now sees as “small poems, austere artworks.”

Sharp insights abound in Price’s crisp, plain-spoken verse (on the shopping cart icon: “Is this the archetype of America, the bin // We can never fill?”), and Price’s emotional range is broad enough to encompass satire, despair, and flashes of real feeling, especially in lines on icons whose designs harken back to the world before: paper clips, paint brushes, the three-columned facade of a bank. “Nothing says bank like a Greek temple // Holding your money, blocking // You from whatever is left”, Price writes. 

The poet’s voice is knowledgeable and often funny, exposing the strangeness and power of such easy-to-overlook images (like the “Angular and sharp” Bluetooth “rune”) with wry asides and deeply human expressions of longing for greater connection.

Production grades

Cover: A-

Design and typography: A

Illustrations: A

Editing: A

Marketing copy: A

Readers' Favorite: Five Stars

Icons is a collection of poetic works in the technology, philosophy, and cultural writing genres. Penned by author Jonathan Reeve Price, this interesting book presents a multidisciplinary exploration of computer icons, combining essays, imagery, and poetry. Price delves into the cultural, historical, and functional significance of one hundred different icons, revealing their deeper meanings and symbolic power. 

He blends personal reflection with cultural analysis, showing how these everyday digital symbols evoke ancient technology, memes, and mysteries, and how they serve as functional buttons within our systems. The book elevates the mundane icons we encounter daily into a form of symbolic art, encouraging readers to reconsider the rich implications behind these seemingly simple images.

Author Jonathan Reeve Price takes an unusual and highly original viewpoint to deliver a captivating journey through the often-overlooked world of computer icons. The book's exploration revealed that these small symbols are so much more than we give them credit for, becoming indicators of culture, history, and the modern codes we live by. As simple and effective artworks, each with its own title, the icons come loaded with implications and attitudes that Price deftly unpacks in wonderful lyricism and bright, enthusiastic, exploratory text. 

His background as a conceptual artist and concrete poet shines through, blending technical expertise with poetic imagination. This fusion makes each page a revelation, transforming everyday icons into rich symbols of human experience and cultural evolution. A few of my personal favorites included the hark-back to classical art in ‘Palette’, the meta-exploration of capturing imagery itself in ‘Lens Blur’, and the highly amusing, energetic feel of ‘Gesture’. Overall, Icons is a must-read for anyone interested in poetry and the cultural impact of technology on our world, and I enjoyed it immensely.

--K.C. Finn, Reviewed on 06/02/2024

Midwest Book Review

Icons is not your typical poetry collection. It lives up to its title and promise by delivering observations on computer icons that reflect not just programmer code, but the powers of practicality. An icon condenses lines of potentially confusing code into a tappable one-hit-solves-all image, that acts (to the author’s mind) as ‘a small poem.” 

The author doesn’t begin with his poetry. He sets the stage with reflections on his background, the evolution and importance of icons, and details about visual and philosophical connections that marry computer worlds and human lives.

The icons that Price surveys don’t just lie in computers, but in the greater world at large. Here they are condensed into singular descriptions, as in the poem ‘360’:

This icon launches code,

Spins the Earth around its axis,

Turns a city street into a whirl,

And races like an angel around a volcano.

The unexpected marriage of computer-generated processes (such as the code ‘border_none,’ designed to avoid putting a box around content) and broader life perspective (as in ‘Download,’ defined as “the process of bringing content and code from the cloud”) creates a synthesis of poetic, social, and IT wonder that will especially attract programmers and those unused to an art form reflecting and connecting engineering and life.

Budding philosophers, too, will find in reflective pieces such as ‘Insights’ a fine sense of revelation and connection inviting discussion and contemplation:

When you look within, is this

What realization brings? Has wisdom

Hit so hard that you see stars?

Enlightenment comes cheap when an icon

Promises to turn numbers into second sight.

Libraries seeking poetry collections will find Icons an attractive enhancement of not just contemporary poetry collections, but suitable for top recommendation to non-art and engineer types who will be happily surprised at how relevant their insights and experiences are for the rest of us.

--Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

Technical CommunicationThinking about how to evaluate communication through graphics can be of interest to those of us in the technical communication community as we can use and evaluate such means of communication in our own work. Jonathan Reeve Price explains in Icons: Poems how the elements of the computer icons we use today and when these graphical elements were created. They were part of what Apple used in their early graphical user interfaces. Price reflects on how these icons today have become part of our culture and everyday digital life. The author takes each of 100 icons and has authored a poem about each one. We typically do not stop to think so deeply about icons. So, it is fun to see Price’s poetic take on each icon. He has a striking enlargement of each icon—one per page—with his poetic musing where he thinks about such things as name and function. Price’s musings can be funny, insightful, and thoughtful. The icons discussed in Icons: Poems are 100 of the 3,000 icons available from Google’s Material Design set. An example is (p. 26), which has a poem in Icons: Poems, that points out in part how versatile the icon is as it can be a noun, verb, glyph, and much more. In looking at each icon, Price asks questions such as whether the icon is beautiful. He also evaluates how effective the icon is in explaining what the shape is meant to express and even questions how humans connect with each other. In our own work, we can ask ourselves related questions about the graphical devices we are using. Such questions and musings can be fun and useful. Anyone involved in communicating information graphically could benefit from reading Icons: Poems to gain insight into how to use, develop, and evaluate a graphical element. The poetry in this book lets us think more deeply about how human beings want to and can communicate and connect. The poetry made me think of the expression—a picture is worth a thousand words—as I thought about how an image or icon can express more than a verbal description alone. Icons: Poems also made me think about the icons in a church and how through these icons, humans try to “persuade that spiritual being to act on our behalf” (p. 15). I asked myself if the people who picked the word “icon” to depict elements in a graphical user interface were right in picking that word. I suppose it was not a bad choice as I could not produce anything better. It was especially notable to me that Price is an STC Fellow with a fabulously interesting background. “He quit the art world to join Apple Computer in 1982, where the introduction of MacPaint was a life-changing event for him. He created a style guide used for many years by technical communicators—How to Write an Apple Manual, later published in several editions under the title, How to Communicate Technical Information,” as explained at the https://www.jonathanreeveprice. com/ site which also notes how Price “has taught information architecture, technical writing, content development, and databases at New York University, Rutgers, New Mexico Tech, and as an adjunct professor, through the University of New Mexico, as well as online through the University of California, Santa Cruz.” Wow! Wow! Wow!--Jeanette Evans, January 31, 2025 Jeanette Evans is an Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication; active in the Ohio STC community, currently serving on the newsletter committee; and co-author of an Intercom column on emerging technologies in education. She holds a master’s in technical communication management from Mercer University and an undergraduate degree in education. FormatsPaperbound Edition 126 pagesPublication: March 15, 2024ISBN-10: 0-9719954-8-6ISBN-13: 978-0-9719954-8-2Dimensions: 8 x 8 inchesPrice: $9.95Amazon page: https://amzn.to/3Vgk9oj
Hardcover Edition126 pagesISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8990368293Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.6 ouncesDimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.48 x 9 inchesAmazon Page : https://amzn.to/44Yd6Uu
Kindle Edition:File size ‏ : ‎ 4426 KBASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CY95QNH2Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ UnlimitedText-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ EnabledScreen Reader ‏ : ‎ SupportedEnhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ EnabledX-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not EnabledWord Wise ‏ : ‎ Not EnabledSticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribehttps://amzn.to/3VhSEtB
PublisherThe Communication Circle4704 Mi Cordelia Dr NWAlbuquerque, NM 87120
(505) 259-7937
Contact: JonathanReevePrice at Gmail