A closer view:

How about making telephone little wider in upper part then in lower? To simulate perspective like you did with other symbols?

One of my favorite solutions, and more in keeping with the "enclosed space" theme of the other icons...

Good suggestion Nick, especially since I wanted to use @ for e-mail when address listing is necessary. It would’ve been amazing with one of those curly cords!

An icon of the whole telephone rather than just the handset would be more in line with the rectangular-block look of the other icons, and would probably also respond more noticeably to a perspective slant...? (Like the characters at Unicode 260E and 260F, http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf)

Dude, your "phone" looks like a magnet.

These are all redundant and obsolete.
So, they might be suitable for a retro face.

Unfortunately, updating the phone icon to twenty-first century norms isn't particularly informative...

iPhone! I’m considering a cellphone-ish symbol. Do you think my symbols are obsolete, Nick (Shinn)? Thanks for pointing out the magnet :)

Do they need to be line drawings? That style definitely looks retro.

Here are 2 sets of icons that include cell phones...

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-8183121-satin-icons-commun...
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-illustration-10273918-bluesico-set-11-n...

I'm not suggesting these sets are the best; they're just examples I found after a quick search.

I'd think a cursive version should be the same as the roman with a amp;@#%* coming out of the ear piece.

Cheers!

… redundant and obsolete.
So, they might be suitable for a retro face.

Ah ja.
This kind of Retroism seems not that obsolete to me.
If I take a look at current applications.
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I've not seen a fax machine since 1995, but my client apparently has one.

> I've not seen a fax machine since 1995

They're still around, but not used nearly as much.

I used to send/receive them all the time, but these days my only client who still uses them is a large corporation that's quite modern in every other way, but for some reason they still send out their purchase orders by fax.

We still have a couple in fairly regular use (incoming, for filled-in forms and marked-up proofs), as our authors span a real mix of very high-tech and extremely low-tech!
Though two-thirds of incoming faxes are spam, which is more annoying than spam email, as we've got to pay for the damn paper...

My answer would be mirror it. Then it's leaning to the right.

Legacy artifacts are a part of all language, verbal and visual. The classic receiver symbol is on the Call and End buttons of the iPhone's phone interface and of most dumb cell phones. I'll worry about the anachronism sometime after we stop calling it "dialing".

Ha, interesting problem Frode. Think oldnick (his first post) and dtw might be onto some kind of solutions here.

I don't think it matters that it is a retro phone, if it helps communicate landline that's OK.

Is there one for mobile too?

I might. Not sure if it's needed for this particular project.

I don't think the symbols should be "italicized." That's for actual letters. Skewing the symbols looks amateurish to me, in general. And the examples you posted look hand-drawn, particularly the first three (probably because of the way the antialiasing made the lines thick and thin).

And the telephone image is très retro. More than half the telephones in the country are cell phones, and that particular handset goes back to the old hard bakelite General Electric things that Jon Voight used to kill the preacher in Midnight Cowboy.!

>> I've not seen a fax machine since 1995

>They're still around, but not used nearly as much.

We still use them, because our customers use them. (all my colour e-mail blasts have to be tested in greyscale to see what they will look like after our salespeople print them out and fax them along). Also, for billing, the fax has more legal standing than an e-mail, if a dispute comes to court. Not sure if this is just in Canada (or not even in Canada, but in one of the other countries we work in).

About the design. Italic symbols are fantastic. Great idea and great execution.

"I don't think the symbols should be 'italicized.' That's for actual letters."

Why not?

I'm just sketching out ideas. They're not finished yet.

Why not?

The symbols aren't letters or numbers or any other textual character. They're images. Try this: set anything in Zapf Dingbats. Then italicize the line. Nothing happens. The font is designed not to be italicized. I tried it in InDesign. I had to apply a manual skew to the Zapf characters.

When image glyphs are slanted, they seem to be tilted in perspective, not just skewed. I don't see lines of type that way, unless the line tapers in some way (like the Superman nameplate on the comic strip or the narration to the first Star Wars movie).

None of this any reason not to italicize symbols, just a reason to do it good.

Well, that's fiar enough. It's like theater: you can do anything as long as you do it well and the audience goes along with it.

Actually, the first thing to catch my eye was the fax. I assume a slanted fax printer would look, well, weird. But next to a slanted computer and a slanted envelope, it does stand out.

If a matching aspect to italicising letters is at stake, pictorial/perspective is perhaps the most fitting. Why not? As it happens I’m designing a set of pictograms myself these days. First try:

This is coming out really funny with the phone handle.
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Outdated or not, this is what I still love most for any posting matters:

Very nice, Andreas. The posthorn was the official symbol of the Norwegian postal service until just a couple of years ago. Might be a good idea for my stuff as well. You could also just use the @ for e-mails. What is the proper way to encode these glyphs, btw?

2706: Telephone receiver.
213B: Fax sign. This is supposed to be an alphabetic glyph that says "FAX" but I think function is more pertinent than form.

For the rest, PUA. I am not sure whether it is legally acceptable to imitate the PUA codepoints used by Microsoft's Wingdings, which uses F02A for an envelope and F03A for a computer. The "glyph order" is supposedly patented. It's probably not worth it anyway since it's still just PUA.

For my part, I already have been spending my time italicizing clouds.

I saw one of those a couple of weeks ago, Nick. Beautiful! So sad the iPad doesn't work as a telephone. Would make for an awesome trick to pull outside the optometrist.

Nick I love you.
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As for the codepoints, posthorn and computer (and others) will become accomodated by regular slots in Unicode 6.0. I’ll report on that later.