Two days ago, I proposed The Offensicon Project, and requested your comments. That phase hasn’t ended; I am still requesting your comments! But from the comments already offered, and from my own testing, I have found some room for improvement in the icon artwork, and made some revisions.
THE COMMENTS
I want to thank the folks who have already offered their opinions. Your suggestions and observations are a great help, and I have tried to address every one of your concerns. Please keep your opinions coming, and don’t be shy about criticizing. I’m trying to improve The Offensicon Project, not fish for praise. (Although I do accept praise graciously.)
And double-thanks to authors who have linked to The Offensicon Project, to draw more voices into the discussion. I mean specifically rzklkng, Bill, Basil, Doug, and Jeff — but to anyone who linked and I didn’t notice, thank you, too.
THE REVISIONS
Here is how I have revised the Offensicon emblems.
OLD REVISED NUDITY 
SEX 
PROFANITY YUCKINESS OTHER
1) HEIGHT The old size was 20 pixels wide by 24 pixels high, which I think was a little too tall for an inline graphic. The new size is 20 pixels square.
2) CORNERS The Offensicons have rounded corners. The old set was antialiased, so that the icons looked good against a white background, but not against a dark background. I have taken away the antialasing at the corners, so the emblems now work equally well against any background.
3) BORDERS Each class of Offensicons has its own color code, which formerly was used for both the artwork and the border. In the new set, I have retained the color-coding in the artwork, but made all the borders dark red.
4) ART Some of the icons did not scale down very well to the small size, so I simplified the artwork to be more usable at 20 pixels square. I have also reduced the number of colors in the palette of each emblem, giving them all a cleaner look.
5) DISCARD In the old set, I had three different icons for sexual content. Now there is only one. Different sorts of sexual activity can be specified in the “alt” text.
Please give me your comments on the revised artwork. It is not “final” by any means, and there are still some further revisions I am considering. (For instance I have not decided whether to make specific icons for “violence” or “drugs,” or whether those should fall under the catch-all “other” category.)
EXAMPLES
Here are some links utilizing the revised Offensicons.
EXAMPLE 1: Those wacky Germans and their erotic Bible calendars 
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EXAMPLE 2: See Wizbang’s current photo caption contest 
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EXAMPLE 3: Protein Wisdom has Arnold’s Tookie analysis 
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THE NEXT STEP: ALPHA TESTING
I still want you to comment on The Offensicon Project even before I take it to Phase Two, but I thought I would tell you what Phase Two will be, so you can make comments about that too, if you have an opinion.
My next step will be to make an “Offensicon Tag Generator,” which will write the HTML for Offensicon-tagged links from a simple input form. Then I will ask for volunteer bloggers and other Web authors to use the Offensicons on their own sites and report how well they are working, and suggest areas of improvement.
Sean:
I was going to suggest squaring off the icons - looks like you beat me to it. *grin*
I might suggest that you look to provide a little DHTML tooltip popup that would contain a fuller description on links marked NSFW.
Hmmm. I’ve just given myself a bit of an idea.
Anyways, keep up the good work.
I actually thought of something else. I spent this evening recoding a friend’s webpage, because she’s entirely blind, and didn’t know what it looked like. is there some way that these tags would have some sort of NSFW pretag, like:
NSFW - N - artistic nude.
I’m not sure how screen-readers take this, and there are very few people this would pertain to, but another thing to think about.
after thinking about it, nudity and adult situations are two different things, just like you have.
and, I’m still not sold on color, though a 16 x16 or 32 x 32 px box would be about the right size.
I could try 16 x 16. Maybe even 15 x 15.
I don’t have much experience with screen readers either. A common prefix isn’t a bad idea, but I don’t like “NSFW.” I would prefer a real word, like “Alert.”
With the colors, I was aiming at making the icons discernable at a glance, without having to scrutinze them. The colors sort of symbolize what the warning is. The ‘nudity’ icons are kind of fleshy-looking; the ’sex’ icon is red, like a red-light district; the ‘profanity’ is blue, for the blue language; the ‘yuckiness’ is green, like Mr. Yuk; and ‘other’ is bright amber, like a caution sign. The fat red borders tie them together into a matching set, and indicate an alert.
Brunch 12-04-2005
Try one of these specials with your weekend brunch:
Soldiers’ Angel says Operation Holiday Spirit is underway
Sadie (Fistful of Fortnights) says size isn’t all that matters
Mudville Gazette looks at Haifa Street
The Therapist checks …
Greetings, and it’s unfortunate that we need to have this conversation at all, as parents should be the one’s doing the filtering, not everyone else. Personal responsibility and all that.
Before we get into the aesthetics, I think there’s a need to mention the mechanics behind something like this…who’s going to be the authority for what’s on a website? How do we make sure that a viewer is of consensual age to view things that are not G-Rated? Central authority? Distributed authority? Standards-based authority? Creater authority (which implies creator liability)? Furthermore, if we are discuss community standards, what community? Is it the community viewed in? The community created? The location where the server and hosting is? Or maybe even the the internet as a place and community with it’s own standards and mores?
Who’s the user of these? Someone in work or (adult) school? If so then a NSFW tag is the accepted informal convention. Secondly would be the why for the NSFW, being sex, violence, language, etc. You also need to think about how this could be used - would filtering programs take it that any site with one of these should automatically be filtered out? No doubt censorship on the net is coming - should we be the ones setting up the infrastructure for it?
That being said, whatever aesthetics are decided on, they should have sufficient alt-text descriptions. Should they be done as PNG of GIF? If there’s a link-class that could go with these, they could automatically being up a “consent” box (FYI, not a programmer by any stretch)?
Oh, and a big last thought on this? Why isn’t there a walled garden for the kid internet with a .kids domain so parents can just wall of their PC access to the internet and leave everybody else out of it.
Oh yeah, do solid color with white graphics instead of border with whitespace. It’ll give it more pop and easier translate to greyscale and lowrez browsers.
Rzklkng, from your first comment I gather that you are misunderstanding the purpose and scope of this project. It really has nothing to do with kids at all, nor with censorship, nor with restricting access, nor with filtering, nor with community standards. The Offensicons wouldn’t be any different than what we have now, with some Web authors voluntarily marking links with warnings about unsafe content. They’re already doing that, as a service to their readers. The Offensicons would just take up less space than text to provide more information (because the descriptive text is in the ALT attribute). Authors would be responsible for the content of their own sites, just as now.
You asked who the user is of these icons. The answer is, anybody who wants. Authors will use them as a benefit to their readers. Readers will use them to decide when and whether to click on a link. Maybe they’re at work, or school. Or maybe they’re in a restaurant, or on a train, or in their own kitchen (as I am now). Being self-employed and 39 years old, I have no supervisors censoring my Internet usage; and yet even I would appreciate knowing when links are going to really revolting images. What if I just had breakfast?
Even though PNG is better in many respects, I’m going with GIF, because GIF has universal support among browsers. Or perhaps I can make both available, and let the users decide.
Your idea for a top-level domain for children sounds nice, but it seems to me that it would have to be policed by somebody.
So when are posting the naked pics to test out this concept then, Sean? lol If you get any “oh my virgin eyes” comments, then you know something needs tweaking. hmmm. strike that.