Reminds me of my first job where the boss designed the application icons. He was trying to create an icon that represented "write back changes to source document".

After struggling with it for a while he drew an arrow pointing to a tomato sauce bottle.

20 years later the icon is still in use...

I want to read this, but I worry that after 10 pages the conclusion is just going to be “use icons when you should use them, and don't use them when you shouldn't”…

Nice article, but it suffers from "iconitis" itself. Could have done with fewer illustrations (made of icons), which broke the flow.