I've always been quite amazed with icons. They're so simple and graphical, yet they hold so much punch.

A good icon is understandable beyond cultures so the language barrier becomes irrelevant. They also save a lot of real estate on a website by not wasting vertical and horizontal space with unnecessary words ... plus a lot of words on a webpage just turns people off (who wants to spend their whole time reading a website just to navigate it?)

I've always experimented with icons throughout my various projects but I always end up scrapping them simply because they suck. They require too much of a commitment ... plus you also got the headaches of making unique icons that can still be learned by your users.

The reason I talk about this is because I spent about 2 hours making 5 or so icons for a new site. I'm quite proud of them (they're adapted from existing icons, so I'm not horribly original) ... but we'll see how well they hold up when I open the site up for testing and people go, "what the hell does this icon do?"

Ah, the joys of having a legend ;)