The older I get, the more I'm convinced that icons are not a terribly good way to convey information. Some things and concepts, sure. Others, not so much. Especially in technology and science.
Navigation can make good use of icons. Left, right, up, down, start, stop, these kinds of things can be learned and used widely. Somethings like text manipulation icons, cursors, insertions, selections, can be used effectively, but can be surprisingly hard to explain or even describe. Icons for operations can be really tough. Right now as I look at my computer I can see a library of arcane and archaic imagery. Telephones, disks, pen nibs, VCR controls (navigation, sort of), little boxes with arrows, little boxes overlapping, deadbolt locks, paper airplanes, file folders, fluffy clouds, paperclips, and of course little hamburgers.
These can certainly be useful clues, but they also can be very confusing. I've seen paint brushes used to indicate a paint brush in a paint program, but I've also seen the exact same icon used to indicate a screen refresh. Now I'm at as much a loss as anyone to come up with a good substitute, although I will note that I can't imagine any _good_ circumstances when a user needs to be in charge of refreshing the screen.
These days I'm using a lot of 3D software, and the user interfaces are a crust of complicated and indecipherable icons. And that's just the top layer of the UI. Almost all of them rely on a text/label system and hot keys for doing much of the work. Discoverability is essentially zero and the only way to get good is to learn the words and the alphabet. Pros end up _hiding_ most of the UI.
Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.
The only one of the icons in the link that make much sense is the one with kcal on it. Unless I dealt, in detail, with these everyday, I'd never remember what the rest stood for. Something like this may make a lot of sense for the people that produce the labels, but I'm unconvinced it does anything good for those who need to _read_ the labels. Word labels in the intended reader's language is almost certainly the best way to go for actual use.
A heretical opinion, but one I agree with. I feel like the success of iOS and Android proves that the world of windows and icons from desktop computers was fine for nerds but ultimately a failure for mainstream use.
I feel that the fabric labels are a straw man though. The labels on clothes can be very small. Icons take less place than text and it is trivial to find an explanation of the symbols. Icons have the advantage of being compact. They are accompanied by text when there is place for it, but it can be omitted when there is not. People will have learnt their meaning by then.
Nothing heretical about it. Many of Earth's greatest civilizations used icons and pictograms. They have all either long since moved away from them (Egypt), or sincerely regret ever having thought of them (China).
Icons are the easiest, most economical way to do internationalization. That's really the only reason we still use them at all. They were never about making life easy for the user. Some people initially thought they'd help in that respect, but they were wrong.
I have never met a Chinese person who regretted the creation of the characters. Rather the opposite... In fact, the characters tended to go phonetic, and every time, the Chinese pushed them back to representing concepts, because that was the only way for the Emperor to communicate within his vast empire of mutually unintelligible dialects.
I'm not sure I would call them either icons or pictograms, though. Some are pictograms, but some are sort of phonetic (category radical + "sounds similar to this other character"), and most are derived in other fashions. Certainly the simplicity of icons is missing.
(But for that matter, the original topic of icons, Christian saints, is missing in all icons. The original icons didn't even express concepts, they expressed people...)
What you saw isn't actually bad, because - unlike the current icon storm on mobile - each icon on that screenshot has a tooltip. Hovering a mouse over a button and waiting for a tooltip is one of the most basic computer use skills. And if you have that, then icons suddenly have a better value proposition.
Not that I personally like icons. I feel I can pattern-match a word faster than I can pattern-match an icon.
The problem here is separating what made ios/android successful and what was merely incidental, or even harmful.
eg. Steve jobs was an asshole, but being an asshole doesn't make you Steve Jobs, and maybe being an asshole was not a major part of what he accomplished.
For what it's worth, I've never really needed to read those icons (I only own two categories of clothing: carefree machine washable clothes, and drycleaning clothes); but if I did, a lot of them would make intuitive sense, especially the ones regarding load size, wringing, ironing and iron temperatures, the no-chlorine symbol... Some of them are a bit ambiguous, but it seems like it's a fair trade for the reduction in tag size, and international accessibility.
Your fabric icons example may seem diffficult to get at first, but once you read what each of this icons represent it's pretty easy to remember that next time
It's not exactly the same. The icons are mnemonics which are mostly useful when you understand what they are trying to represent. Words on the other hand are totally useless if you don't speak the language they're in. It would be very difficult to memorize a word just by its appearance in comparison to an icon.
There's all sorts of words I can recognise in other languages, despite not speaking them. French, German, Italian, Spanish; all these have more than a handful of words that most fairly literate native English speakers can recognise, even excluding the loan words. We learn them from exposure and association, just like with icons.
Likewise, words are not totally useless if you don't speak the language. I don't speak any of the above languages, but I can still make basic comments like oui/non, ja/nein, etc.
For whatever reason I had the opposite take: after just skimming the article I could quickly identify the icons' corresponding nutritional "unit" on the very bottom chart. I can't say I personally like the aesthetics of the icons, but for a global company trying to make a few nutritional facts universally identifiable, I would say they did a great job. I am still not going to eat there though...
I don't think it's actually that heretical. Most icons are actually quite culture-specific (i.e. mostly "western") even though we like to think otherwise. A lovely example is the "save" icon which depicts a Diskette -- there are few people these days who have actually physically interacted with a Diskette (of whatever circumference).
Another favorite of mine is the "random hand gesture (emot)icon". The conventions for this around the world are, apparently, all over the place(!). Some places a thumbs-up means "great!", and in other places it means "I <did-bad-thing-to> your wife!". (Maybe that's a myth, though.)
> Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.
Definitely. Just to pick a few trivial examples: "solitude", "happiness", "love", "depeche mode". Alright, that last one was two words, but it was a single "token" in our common language.
EDIT: Just as a side note: This is really fascinating stuff! It's really hard to tease apart what is "cultural" (i.e. local tribe) vs. what is "hardwired" (i.e. "genetics").
But just because the save icon was bad _when it was made_ doesn't mean you shouldn't use it now. It's part of a universal design language, and trying to pivot to literally any other icon will be fraught with confusion and trouble.
It no longer represents a floppy disk but in most people's minds it is a 'save' in and of itself
> A lovely example is the "save" icon which depicts a Diskette
The biggest problem with the save icon is that some designers have decided to use the large down arrow (which is used by browsers for download) instead of save. Thereby throughly confusing users.
You're right, of course, but I think that if McDonalds let others use them, they'd have a good chance of becoming well-known within a generation, just like some of the old VCR icons are today due to use in myriad music players, video players, etc.
> “We realize that some of the visuals may not already be strongly linked in consumer minds to the nutrient they
are meant to depict in all markets.”
> “We intend to promote understanding of the images through supporting materials in Europe, from web sites
to images explained on tray liners and via in-store displays,”
...
> “After repeated exposure to these images,
customers should eventually grasp their meaning, with or without printed labels next to them.”
I think the important question is whether a Chinese reader would understand the character脂 (also 'fat') on its own without the whole phrase, the way we would understand 'carb' or 'cal'.
What I found most interesting was not the rather meaningless icon choices, but the incredibly deceptive dotted line seen on page 12. It's basically anchoring people in a meaningless way such that not everything seems bad.
Without the line it's like 50% more sodium relative to the number of calories I am eating. That's terrible. With the line ehh, I guess everything looks ok.
The line simply shows one third of your recommended daily allowance (based of the somewhat popular notion of "three square meals a day" I imagine). If anything it's useful.
A single serving that breaches the line should be treated with caution, making it straightforward to understand which foods are contributing disproportionately to your daily allowance.
Consider your looking at fries and it's 30% of your daily sodium intake which is below the line. But, it's only 10% of your daily calorie intake because it's a side for one meal. In that context it's sodium relative to calories that's important or sodium in combination with the rest of your meal. In none of those cases is a line at 33.3% useful for anything.
Is the dotted line deceptive? It just seems like a ⅓DV line (for the large number of people who eat three meals in a day), which clearly shows you that this meal is high in sodium, so should be accompanied with other meals which are lower in sodium.
You are falling for the framing. If something is 28% of your DV worth of calories it's not a meal. The line makes it seem that as long as each 'bad' item is under the line it's ok.
Sure the fries are over it, but the burger only 1/2 way their so that's probably ok.
Yeah -- think about a lot of commonly accepted icons, like for nuclear radiation or biohazards. Or even the weird icons like those for "pause" and "record" on media devices -- these aren't intuitive icons, we've just gotten used to them.
None of the icons McDonald's chose as their final ones had any meaning to me without a translation chart. How is that different from learning what a word means?
Didn't anyone at McDonald's dare to question the basic idea of this?
That was what they were aiming for. They wanted symbols that were either obvious in meaning, or 'blank slates' onto which they could imbue meaning. What they were trying to avoid was symbols who preexisting associations would contradict or cause confusion with the meaning they wanted to provide.
Better to give meaning to nonsense than to try and fight against peoples' culture.
> McDonald’s faced this daunting challenge with its recent Nutrition Information
Initiative (NII). The company wanted to make nutrition information more accessible and understandable to the average consumer, and determined through extensive research that visual icons representing key food nutrients (protein, for example) were the appropriate course of action.
It sounds like McDonald's had decided the icons were the way to go before bringing in this translation company.
Are you saying it would be better to just teach their customers the English words for these things? Esperanto? I mean, I might probably agree with that, but I don't know that the customers would.
> Are you saying it would be better to just teach their customers the English words for these things?
Yes. It's the same amount of teaching and learning. Actually, it's probably less of both, because:
1. A fair fraction (most?) of the customers would already know some english, whereas zero know what those icons mean.
2. Knowledge of english words is valuable to anyone and is transferable to other domains. Knowledge of McDonald's icons is useless outside of McDonald's.
3. Deciphering english is a trivial peck at an online dictionary. Whatcha gonna do about an icon?
They explains it in the paper. There are cultural and legal limitations. So your knowledge of English will not help when you travel to a country that requires packaging in native language. On the other hand, learning 'universal' icons will help you everywhere.
The point was not to get optimal international recognition. Almost the opposite: every symbol should be inoffensive and connote no negative or inappropriate ideas in 108 countries.
Of course McDonalds is in an excellent position to slowly give these symbols meaning through constant exposure, but inherently the way they're designed does not convey anything at all. They might as well have just used colours or shapes.
How true is that? A started as a cow (flip it upside down). That meaning is lost, true, but the Sackcasse (no exit) street sign, or a "T" junction street sign both abstract a physical system.
The Korean alphabet shapes relate to the shape your mouth adopts to make the sound. Many Hanzi have structural association (even ignoring the radicals, which you could consider for the purpose of this discussion analogous to spelling)
And the meaning of the chemical symbols (e.g. "Fe" as the symbol for iron) made a lot of them easier for me to learn, though if you don't grow up with the right set of languages they are somewhat arbitrary.
And, of course, they provide employment for semioticists.
Typically (or perhaps always) in EU countries, both kJ and kcal are specified on nutrition labels. And in my experience most people only ever talk about calories (kcal), much like in the US.
In the end, it was determined that there was no guarantee that a re-established civilization could grasp what we were trying to say, and that perhaps just an area earning a reputation as cursed, via attribution of visitors, would be the best deterrent.
Therefore, I would submit: "These are not foods of honor. No highly held nutritional facts are described here. Nothing valued is here."
That whole effort was such a waste of time and money. If civilization collapses, what does it matter if the waste storage site is disturbed? It's not like it's going to be a threat to humanity. Without advanced technology, any damage from radioactivity would be limited to the local population.
To extract a large amount of contaminated material and spread it around the world, you would need an advanced technological civilization, which would then be able to detect radioactivity. If anything, a big concentration of it may help accelerate their scientific progress at some point.
Well the issue would be that it hurts the local population. And maybe you can prevent them from getting hurt, if you try to come up with a good warning.
But there's an opportunity cost. You pay a whole interdisciplinary committee to sit on their asses thinking about it for n weeks (I don't even want to know how long it took). You could take that money and use it on a million other things that would result in a larger reduction of people-getting-hurt.
What would that be? Those million other things that prevent people 1000, 2000, 5000 years from now from getting hurt? A good warning seems like a great idea, and low cost, high impact. Problem is, no language has lasted for 10,000 years.
If you found that article interesting, you might want to read Gregory Benford's "Deep Time" (978-0380975372). Benford was part of the same panel (though in a different group), and the first half of the book is in-depth discussion of the various aspects of the problem that they had to consider.
Okay, I've got a crazy idea. Why not create a combination of words that expresses the thing, instead of these very weird and incomprehensible-at-first-glance icons?
For example, for proteins: the word "protein" is understandable in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek and Swedish. The Russian "belok" should be understandable to Polish and Russian speakers, and the Dutch "eiwitten" should be understandable to Dutch and German speakers. Thus, writing "protein/belok/eiwitten" would be understood by almost everyone. "kcal" is even simpler and should be understood by almost everyone everywhere - maybe make it "kcal/calories" for more readability. "salt/sol/αλάτι" should cover everybody as well. Perhaps throw in the Cyrillic as well if McDonalds expects a large amount of uneducated Russians in their restaurants.
You could even put the native language in front to prevent any insult to cultures. Am I crazy, or might this actually work?
Even weirder, according to the chart on page 5, German seems to be the only one to describe the kcal unit unambiguously as Kilokalorien. Where all others go for calorien (Which could either mean the small cal or large calorie Cal/kcal) or completely unitless with describing it as energy content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
How would they understand the original icons, then? Nobody I asked understood them, except for the "kcal" icon which you would only understand if you could read.
McDonald's plan to get people to understand them is to put the words next to the icons to get people to understand the icons, which also wouldn't help if you can't read.
Sure, only a relatively small percentage of the population of Germany/Poland/etc may not be able to read. But how many of those visit McDonald's? Do they visit it more or less often than other categories of people? How important is it for them to be able to understand these icons? Is the cost of developing icons/signs they also understand more or less than the amount of trouble them not understanding these icons would bring? Are we talking about actual literacy or the more nebulous category of "functional literacy"?
There are cases where "devil's advocate"-style questions are worthwhile, and I'd argue that they're worth at least considering in this case.
I would be surprised to find that there would exist a significant proportion of people who simultaneously couldn't read and understood nutrition and proteins
> “We have accomplished our mission: keep the information simple, easy to understand, language-free and top line.”
I find this amusing since the first icon is "kcal"... The information is perhaps too simple, as none of these really lets me know what they mean. Without a legend, I wouldn't know what they mean, and if your icons need a legend, then they really aren't doing their job effectively.
Can all things be solely and uniquely communicated by an icon? I'd expect not - it's not so different from the collisions you get with TLAs (Three letter acronyms)
On the other hand, is an icon set successful if you can see the label once and then keep it straight without labels in the future? I'd say so and I think this work gets close to doing that.
If McDonald's hadn't copyright/trademarked the icons, maybe. But if McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Applebee's, the US government nutritional publications, etc. all have a different icon set, good luck.
But if we do that then things could look more like the FDA label and just literally repeat the words "fat", "protein," etc but translated into the local language.
Because there's no ambiguity. I have no idea what those icons mean except 'cal' or 'kcal', so if I have to look up a legend then to decode it then I might as well have the word in place. A giant table of icons & numbers isn't necessary a better case than a giant table of words that I can read & numbers.
I believe half the point was to design for the use-case where you can't fit a "giant table of words [you] can read & numbers." Where currently the nutritional information ends up in restaurants on e.g. a sheet on the wall instead of on your food, or in grocery stores on product bulk packaging (e.g. cardboard boxes that get thrown away, etc.) instead of on the individual product units.
Consider that numbers take up relatively-constant amounts of space, but words for some nutritional concepts in some languages can be extremely long—and mostly you design for this by just requiring the design-element to have a box-size of the widest possible text in the widest language, and then padding the box with empty space almost all of the time.
Removing the words, and just having icons + numbers, allows for a design that can be very "narrow" in horizontal area, taking up a basically-constant amount of space with very little padding, allowing it to fit in many places it currently wouldn't.
I would suggest that if it can't currently fit then it needs to be rethought if it should be there at all, especially if abbreviations can't be used in whatever language it's required.
Icons that are impossible to decipher don't improve anything IMHO. Perhaps they should have gone culturally-specific, something with just the first letter, or anything else that people might locally understand if the word absolutely can't be used.
Why is it a problem if people can't understand the icons right now? The goal is to slap them on everything, everywhere, for decades. Complete, textual nutrition labels will continue existing where they already do. People will make the mental association when they're looking at their food packaging and see the two kinds of labels, with the same numbers between the two.
Is it a problem that the "floppy disk" symbol for saving documents is now meaningless, since floppy disks are dead? Kids who encounter the icon today, just learn the meaning by rote. To them, it's an opaque language element representing a concept—just like, say, Chinese characters. Humans turn out to be okay at just absorbing the associations of an opaque icon over time, without the icon needing to be specifically evocative (skeuomorphic) of anything. It just needs to be unique.
And re: "it needs to be rethought if it should be there at all"—consider, for example, individual-serving yoghurt snack tubes. What's in them? Who knows? The info is on the box, not on the tube. Can you "count calories" on a lunch containing one? Nope, not unless you wrote down the calories from the box when you were at home. Kind of annoying, no?
Because these icons are for mcdonalds only. If magically they were universally adopted, then I'd agree. I seriously doubt they will, especially because they're not particularly clear as they currently stand.
So the icon for "fat" is a tape-measure, indicating that "fat" is the bad type of calories that makes you fat ... Was this made by designers, or by actual experts? Or is there malice involved here?
I noticed that, too. Unfortunately it seems like it's going to take several more years to shake off the aggressive anti-fat lobbying and paid "research" by the sugar industry. Also, I'd imagine McDonalds would be much less willing to warn its customers against their offerings high in sugar or refined carbohydrates.
There are some not so subtle emotional connotations to the icons which make the icons easier to understand/remember but problematic in usage.
Protein is the bottom of a stack -- implies important or less important depending on your personal view point on stacks
Fat is a scale, implying an association with weight -- a negative link.
Carbs are a gas gauge implying energy -- a positive link.
I frequently travel to non-English speaking countries and am conscious of what I ingest - the attempt to standardize nutrition labeling on an international scale is a great effort!
At this point, no, I don't know what the symbols mean without a legend, but I'm sure at some point in time, not everyone knew that a red octagon on a post means stop.
> McDonalds has a clear conflict of interest in the design of these icons for nutrition information.
I could understand the point if they'd created McDonald's-specific units (e.g 10 grams of sugar = 1 McVigor). But they're just icons for info that McDonald's makes no effort to hide.
Not GP, but using a weight scale for fat and a fuel gauge for carbs, suggests that fat makes you fat while carbs give you energy. This thinking, enshrined in the FDA food pyramid, led to the modern epidemic of obesity and diabetes.
> McDonald’s doesn’t plan to use the individual images by themselves for this reason. “When you present the visuals for
the five key nutrients together in full color,” Fairgrieve concludes, “the potentially negative connotations of
red fade away.”
> Some colors were changed because nutritionist feedback identified red with protein, yellow with fat and green with energy.
Red, I understand. Muscle fibre (what protein builds, in most people's minds) is red. Yellow is fat because fat is, itself—in large enough amounts—a light yellow color. Butter, margarine, liposuction ejecta... etc.
Energy, though, is a bit hard to deduce. Notice that the symbol beside carbs is a gas gauge. Petrol is, in fact, a somewhat-greenish liquid. And I'm guessing petrol was the subliminal metaphor here. You "fill up on" energy like a car fills up on gas; and carbs make you go like gas makes a car go.
I had to work through it by a process of elimination, like a Sudoku puzzle: the "fat" symbol is definitely evoking "tape measure around the waist" iconography, perhaps implying (falsely) that "fat is the thing that makes you fat"—but more likely just putting people in mind of their weight and then saying "yeah, that stuff, that's what's in this."
Given that, it'd be redundant for the carbs icon to also be about weight. It's a meter of some sort, though. To me, it's either temperature—or pressure in a storage tank. Temperature would somewhat make sense, in the idea that carbs are the simplest thing that the body burns, and eating more carbs literally makes you hotter. But there are more common icons for temperatue (e.g. an old mercury thermometer with the teardrop base), so it's probably not temperature. Pressure it is.
Given that the referent is carbs, what would the storage tank be filled with? Probably a liquid. Liquid sugar? Sugar isn't green. What's a green liquid? Most hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are like carbohydrates, and serve many of the same functions for machines that carbs do for humans.
What's a common hydrocarbon pressure gauge? A car's gas gauge.
That one was actually clear to me. "That looks like a fuel gauge. Carbs are our main energy source - fuel." But I paid no attention to the colors.
Fat, on the other hand, made no sense to me. And I had to go back and read the text to see if they really did intend it as "measuring tape to measure how fat you are", and yeesh, they did. That's... bad.
So is grain alcohol. That does not make it plant matter. Both are so far removed from "plants" that the association with it's original components is effectively meaningless. Bread is not a plant product, it is its own thing: a bread product.
Compare the equivalent product, rice. Rice is stewed grass seeds. You don't think it's a plant product? Are potatoes a plant product?
Grain alcohol, depending on how you prepare it, might easily retain no trace of biological material other than sugar and alcohol. That is not true of bread; bread is not heavily processed at all. You could trivially analyze any sample of bread and determine what plants it was made from.
Claiming that bread is not a plant product makes all the sense of claiming that cheese is not a milk product.
Yea. It's still weird as hell to call rice a vegetable as if that's meaningful. Doubly weird to consider rice's vegetable-ness as leading to its carbness.
Most of the rice plant is just fiber, nutritiously.
Fiber is a carbohydrate too, you know. What non-vegetable source of carbohydrates do you know of? As far as I'm aware, human dietary carbohydrates overwhelmingly come from (1) grass; (2) potatoes; (3) fruit; or (4) sugar beets. There is a reason for this: carbohydrate is the basic structural material of plants in the same way that protein is the basic structural material of animals.
I guess you could call honey an animal source of carbohydrates. It's not exactly a huge part of any non-hunter-gatherer's diet. And the bees have to make it from flowers.
McDonald's has made billions from standardizing operations as much as possible across the world.
> If they allowed a greater quantity of icons that work better for each region, why wouldn't this simply be better?
Economies of scale, consistent printed materials.
Rather than have 109 variants of the icons printed on 109 variants of the packaging you standardize as much of the package as you can, allows you to print larger volumes and distribute them more easily.
Saves money in the long run. Having gone through the process of ordering package prints I can say for sure that single run prints of packaging at scale is much cheaper than 100 variants. When you're operating at the level of McDonalds everything, no matter how minuscule, becomes something to be optimized.
Not to mention the fact that there are regulations and standards that prescribe how this information needs to be displayed in many places. For example, this wouldn't meet the standards for nutritional information in Australia (we have a standardidised table form).
Maybe the solution to iconography needs like this is Chinese characters. Many of the design criteria -- legibility at various sizes, distinctness, adaptability to different layouts and colors -- are readily met.
Two character combinations for some of the McDonald's symbology can be kind of complicated, though:
Sorry I don't understand your comment, in the first part you propose a solution, but then you explain why it won't not work.
Icons should be universally distinguishable/recognizable, I as a european do not see any easy distinction between the characters you just wrote, they all seem similar to my.
In putting forth my proposal, I also considered an argument against it; but I did not mean to present it as a conclusive argument defeating it.
I am a mid-western American. The characters do look distinctive to me; but I took some Chinese in high school, many years ago -- so maybe I am not a good test case. Part of my reason for posting, was to get feedback from people with different backgrounds.
anyone think it's strange they don't include sugar as one of the base 5 nutrients alongside carbs, proteins, etc? I for one would like to know how much sugar my meal has.
Problem: our food has too many poisons we need to disclose. Solution: better icons for all the types of poisons! Did anyone think of a different solution?
It's quite remarkable how isolated from the world the people named in that document seem to be. It is as if they had never travelled anywhere outside the US before starting the project. Or if they had they had been stunningly unobservant.
This is painful. Fat, why not a bucket of lard? Salt, why not a salt shaker??? These icons are incomprehensible for the educated and the uneducated mind alike.
A bucket of lard? Is lard stored or served in buckets? We buy lard in blocks where I live. I can imagine drawing a bucket but how do you convey the lard part of it? Maybe buckets of lard aren't as universal as you think they are and McDonalds already knows this.
Don't get me wrong, but I just don't see the point in this. This looks like a pretty in-depth study, why couldn't we use these man hours to create something of actual value? Why does someone care that some people associated an icon with "scary alien"? Just put the icon descriptions somewhere on the page and use circles with a single letter inside for all I care.
Are you trying to tell me you understand what any of those mean without a legend? The only one that's decipherable is "kcal", all the others could as well be scary aliens.
You mean a formerly massively successful multinational company that is now on a wild downswing and is bikeshedding almost as badly as marissa meyer designs corporate logos.
You're insane if you think a bunch of icons on the back side of tray-covering paper are the reason for McDonald's success.
They would've got very similar effect by using single letters in a circle - they're not offensive and would suggest as much to their actual meaning as a bunch of abstract icons.
Navigation can make good use of icons. Left, right, up, down, start, stop, these kinds of things can be learned and used widely. Somethings like text manipulation icons, cursors, insertions, selections, can be used effectively, but can be surprisingly hard to explain or even describe. Icons for operations can be really tough. Right now as I look at my computer I can see a library of arcane and archaic imagery. Telephones, disks, pen nibs, VCR controls (navigation, sort of), little boxes with arrows, little boxes overlapping, deadbolt locks, paper airplanes, file folders, fluffy clouds, paperclips, and of course little hamburgers.
These can certainly be useful clues, but they also can be very confusing. I've seen paint brushes used to indicate a paint brush in a paint program, but I've also seen the exact same icon used to indicate a screen refresh. Now I'm at as much a loss as anyone to come up with a good substitute, although I will note that I can't imagine any _good_ circumstances when a user needs to be in charge of refreshing the screen.
These days I'm using a lot of 3D software, and the user interfaces are a crust of complicated and indecipherable icons. And that's just the top layer of the UI. Almost all of them rely on a text/label system and hot keys for doing much of the work. Discoverability is essentially zero and the only way to get good is to learn the words and the alphabet. Pros end up _hiding_ most of the UI.
Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.
The only one of the icons in the link that make much sense is the one with kcal on it. Unless I dealt, in detail, with these everyday, I'd never remember what the rest stood for. Something like this may make a lot of sense for the people that produce the labels, but I'm unconvinced it does anything good for those who need to _read_ the labels. Word labels in the intended reader's language is almost certainly the best way to go for actual use.