Expressions · 07
Five kinds of drawing, and they are not interchangeable.
The question is never what would look good here. It is what this section's point is. A row of claims dressed up as a diagram reads as decoration, and a mechanism explained with a row of marks cannot show how anything connects.
Icon
A bare line glyph. No plate, no floor.
Inside a mock, or a list dense enough that a plate would shout. An icon is punctuation.
Mark
The isometric tile, carrying one glyph.
A row of parallel claims, one mark per claim, all the same size. It stands for an idea and cannot show a relationship.
Diagram
Plates and solids at 2:1, with real walls.
When the relationship between the parts IS the argument. It earns its space by being unreadable as a sentence.
Scene
A real device frame with real product UI.
When the reader needs to picture it inside their own product. One per section, and the screen has to be one we ship.
Object
Photoreal. Lamps, grain, a milled chip.
Reserved. Exactly one exists, on the homepage. It stops being special the second there are two.
Do Pick one tier per section, then draw it properly.
Not Mix a mark and a diagram in the same row, or reach for a scene because the section looks empty.