Icons, pictograms and mini-illustrations: where is the line between them?

I have long been interested in the issue of terminology in icon business. How, for example, do icons differ from icons ? Somewhere I heard the opinion that icons are pictograms that are optimized for screen display (size, resolution, color depth). But what about a specific example?


For the site of the Norwegian financial group Storebrand, with the huge efforts of TurboMilk designers , a set of more than fifty “icons” was drawn. I used quotation marks because it is not clear what exactly it turned out and how to correctly name it. It seems to me that these are still icons. Here are the signs of iconicity I see:

• Fixed size - all pictures are used in the size of 128x128
• "General" color palette
• Unified “language” of metaphors in a set
• Unified perspective and commonality of perspectives respected