No Ideas But In Things is a photoblog of dials, buttons, knobs, levers, handles, switches, and other pieces of user interface design.
posted by tepidmonkey on Oct 10, 2007 - 19 comments

History of the Button, a weblog devoted to 'tracing the history of interaction design through the history of the button, from flashlights to websites and beyond'. This presentation [4.5MB .pdf] provides a quick-fire pictorial history of the things we push to do stuff.
posted by jack_mo on Sep 22, 2006 - 12 comments

So I guess it started when Jeremy Hedley made these buttons, dissatisfied as he was with the W3 Validator's default icons. Or was it Winer's white-on-orange button that did it, and the ensuing variations that appeared? In any case, we now have pixely buttons for just about everything, scripts to make even more, and GUI frontends to those scripts for fun and ease. And if you want to be kind to their servers; here's the source if you have Image::GD.
posted by brownpau on May 21, 2003 - 34 comments

Dave Winer's not happy about the fact that people are tweaking the orange XML icon used to link RSS/RDF feeds. You've seen that orange button saying XML at various sites, including MeFi. Milo just put up one saying RSS instead of XML, which was based on a point brought up by xiffix, "In hindsight, appropriating the global acronym XML for this narrow use was a mistake. The button should say RSS. Hopefully, people will take Dave’s suggestion to do something completely different to heart and abandon the Userland attempt at a standard icon"
posted by riffola on Oct 30, 2002 - 28 comments