Early Play and Record icons, part 2

(Continuing from Early Play and Record icons, part 1)

Even as late as 1967, some companies were still experimenting and struggling with the icons for the standard media controls such as Play and Record. The buttons are too small, the words are too big. How do you compensate? You have to create a shorthand somehow.

Here’s another example, a 1967 Ampex reel-to-reel recorder.

From a quick distance glance, you can already sense the red button is for Record. But looking closer…

Wow. Initials and icons all mixed up!

You can almost sense the designer/engineer’s logic:

Damn, “Record” won’t fit on this button. I know, I’ll just use an R. Everyone will know that means Record. Hey that works. S means Stop. P means Play. Awesome! Now F means Fast Forward and R means Rewind. SRFPR. Uh oh, I have two Rs. Eh, it’s okay. I have the white R and the red R. Nah, maybe that won’t work. I’ll just use arrows for Rewind and Fast Forward, everybody else is. Wow, that all looks really weird together. No time to fix it, it has to be done today. Okay, done!

Besides being a design mishmash and just plain ugly, the single letters are awful as icons. They are also the worst possible idea if you want your product to be used globally. Will someone in Japan or Spain be able to immediately know that pushing the S button will stop playing?

Thankfully, this design approach died quickly.

But also notice, there is still no Pause button. That takes a few more years to show up…