[HN Gopher] The Manicule: The little hand that's everywhere
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       The Manicule: The little hand that's everywhere
        
       Author : bookofjoe
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2025-04-10 01:01 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.messynessychic.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.messynessychic.com)
        
       | gwern wrote:
       | One of the frustrating things about the manicule is what I think
       | is the reason you don't see it used online, and it is
       | "everywhere" only in physical media: cluttered pages/GUIs and
       | low-DPI screens mean that almost all of those manicules you see
       | as scans just don't work as a digital manicule. It's always
       | easier to use some sort of arrow or background highlight or other
       | way of calling attention to a particular line. Note that OP makes
       | no use of a manicule in this web page, and the _only_ web example
       | OP gives is an emoji - which was intended for SMS chat messages
       | (and looks very ugly, even ignoring the color or other issues
       | with emoji). That is probably why it is honored mostly in the
       | breach by contemporary web designers - many more know about it
       | than use it.
       | 
       | Like that gorgeous orange (letterpress, I assume) manicule you
       | see in the middle of OP - that line-work will never work when
       | scaled down and put into a web page as a normal little manicule.
       | The details get lost in a blur, the hand becomes a solid blob of
       | black, it looks goofy and out of place (note: for the mouse
       | pointer, this is a feature, not a bug), or it ceases to look like
       | a hand at all to someone who isn't primed for it by an article.
       | 
       | I can tell you that because I tried one that looked a lot like
       | that. I went through literally hundreds of manicules from
       | Wikimedia Commons, Font Awesome, Google Images, and articles like
       | this, trying dozens of them on my actual website, and it took
       | that long to find a single one I was at all happy with in
       | context. I was shocked. No other icon I use on my site was _that_
       | hard to find an adequate version of. (We _really_ wanted a
       | manicule for our use-case, so we persevered.)
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | > No other icon I use on my site was that hard to find an
         | adequate version of.
         | 
         | Ones I always find it difficult to find good icons for are
         | "users/people" and "save file".
        
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       (page generated 2025-04-13 23:00 UTC)