Don't invent strange objects. The icon must be easy to understand: Banana - Slide!

Francesco Cavalli

Every translation is a betrayal. Evoke instead, evoke!

The name of this site comes from a graphic design lesson at university. The professor was explaining how to associate an icon with a meaning. He didn't give us a rule but asked: what icon should we use for "sliding"?

Silence in the classroom, someone tried with a drop, someone with tire treads but nothing convinced us. Then, he drew a banana peel on the board.

Banana -> Slide

For fuel, the pump, for a restaurant, fork and knife, for a bar, the coffee cup. It's not about finding the sign that translates the word, it's about evoking the action. Just like the emergency exit is a man fleeing.

A Definition Isn't Enough

In interface design, there's a lot of talk about accessibility and how an icon alone doesn't guarantee it. They say to pair a word with the icon, as if that were enough. Not even words, however legible, guarantee understanding. The pair might be correct but lead astray. It's not about translating the language of signs into current language. It's about evoking.

How does evocation work? You take a spirit and give it a body. In this case, an abstract concept must become real, tangible. It must manifest in something recognizable. The banana isn't universal. It works because many of us know that gag, or at least its logic. If the context changes, the image that can serve also changes. Evoking doesn't mean relying on a magical symbol, but knowing well the people, the habits, and the context in which that sign will be encountered.

The Metaphors We No Longer See

Jorge Luis Borges reclaims a radical phrase from Leopoldo Lugones: "every word is a dead metaphor." The formula appears in his lectures collected in This Craft of Verse: a word becomes so familiar that we forget the image, the gesture, or the relationship from which it was born.

It's not an invitation to distrust words. It's an invitation to remember that language is never just a system of labels. Even when it seems more neutral, it carries a history of sedimented images. Borges also observed how repeated metaphors can become a kind of exhaustion: when they no longer show anything, they remain only a way of speaking automatically.

A banana drawn to mean slide does the opposite movement. It briefly brings back to life a connection between two different things. It doesn't explain everything and doesn't need to. It makes the scene necessary for the meaning to happen.

This space is born to pay attention to this kind of evocation. When a thought triggers another, unconsciously. Taking notes can make you stumble upon a thought already known to see it from a higher perspective, to make it once again exceptional.

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Note on sources: the formula is from Leopoldo Lugones, rephrased by Borges in “The Metaphor”, lecture from This Craft of Verse (Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 22). In a conversation from 1966, Borges also reflects on the exhaustion of repeated metaphors of Anglo-Saxon poets.