Iconography help!
 

Ok so I know jack all about "best practices" for iconography and I have a feeling most of what I find online will be worthless so I'm instead going to get your opinions and dive right in!

Basically, I have two projects that require custom map icons.

#1 . I have an event(sort of) mapping thing... EventZombie (some of you may remember this project) and it currently uses three colors of the standard Google map markers to designate when/if there are things going on at a particular spot. NOW I need to add a different icon to designate that there is a drink special going on. (not just standard happy hour but a nightly thing like Mexican Mondays with cheap Mexican beers and margaritas) The question is... should I just make a new color for that? OR should I make a whole new icon OR should I go one step further and make them all custom icons...

#2 THIS IS THE HARD ONE. I have a Bar Sales reporting tool for Texas bar owners. It currently maps all the bars in an area and then uses a green up arrow to designate sales increases over a given time period and a red down arrow for down. Duh. Oh and yellow circle for no change. These currently look like dog poo and need to be changed. What I need are icons that not only designate % change but also designate total volume. Yes you can click and a popup gives all this info but its important to be able to see at a glance as well.What I am thinking is maybe just make prettier arrows then put a circle around them and the color of the circle would designate volume. Like these...

http://thumb15.shutterstock.com/phot...16407736,2.jpg

but in the circle would be an up or down arrow or yellow horizontal line for no change.

Ok, tell me I'm dumb and give me better ideas please!

make a colored beer bottle or martini glass

so you mean you want to show that a bar that averages 10k a week has increase sales and a bar that averages 5k a week has a down week? Or you need to show that a bar made either 5k or 10k?

it's all per month but yeah more like 0-25K,25-50k,50-100k, 100k-250k,etc

So you can glance at map and see total sales volume for current month for each bar AND the little arrow tells you if that is an increase or decrease from last month. (anything +/- 15% counts as significant)

Can you just make a number icon (that is the volume) and have it red/yellow/green based on trend?

You could have the color indicate the month to month change, and circle could indicate volume. Empty circle = low volume, etc. Or the size of the icon could indicate volume.

And those icons you have look like guitar picks. You might want to play that up for a more stylized look.

I wish! We are talking about a TON of bars in given areas. The numbers would be unreadable and blend together. I can't really show you the TABC map (it's behind a secure wall) but here is a test area for EventZombie.

http://www.eventzombie.com/mobile/map.php?dis=stjoe

I used St Joe just for fun, the real areas will be all in Texas to start. Like Austin...

http://www.eventzombie.com/mobile/map.php?dis=atx_dt

Here you can see how tightly packed the icons can get. And these are just simple markers not even up/down arrows in a circle or whatever I end up with for the Sales maps.

I would love to use SIZE of the icon but they are just too tightly packed that you'd have to zoom too much to differentiate them and then you lose the value of "at a glance" reporting.

Yeah, I think the circle color for volume and a colored arrow inside the circle for % change is what I am going to run with.
OH and I also am adding a "heat map" for both % and volume (obviously two different maps) so you can see trends for entire areas of town.

a red/yellow/green pick with a number inside that they can see when they zoom in? i mean, this that many overlapping, can they really see anything usable without zooming in to some extent?

Just tried it actually, number aren't scaling well, looking awful. I think I'm stuck with very basic primitives.

Can you make them green up arrows, yellow sideways arrows, and red down arrows, and the size of the arrows indicates the size of the establishment (or perhaps the size of the change)? It's simple, it's intuitive, and it shows your support for Native American culture.

Can't really mess with sizes it screws things up pretty badly and I'm already overcrowded making them as small as I can and still viewable.

Dang.

Maybe you could go with brightness of hue on the red-yellow-green scale. More intense colors equal bigger change.

Ok it looks like issue #2 is close to being resolved... here are some samples of "circle" markers... any particular ones that look best? Oh and keep in mind they will be MUCH smaller than this on the map...

http://cdn.webiconset.com/map-icons/images/markers.png

http://pixelsdaily.designshack.netdn...ap-markers.png