If you feel like doing some detective work, you can try and work out why these icons correspond to these specific cities. Were they paired randomly, did the designer have something in mind?

If you take a look at Dortmund, all the icons consist of a single strong line, which has a gap somewhere along it. The icon description underlines this, so apparently it is an important “feature” of the city as well. Does it symbolize the river Emscher flowing through the city? The Dortmund-Ems Canal which links Dortmund to the North Sea? The city also has a fair number of moated castles, perhaps the lines symbolize the moat, the gap symbolizes the drawbridge?

If you’re into icon design, you might want to think this through, since a lot of “theory” work like this goes into creating an icon set that works well, and has a deeper meaning.

Enjoy the comments, and remember, be kind to ducks!

In a nutshell, the angler fish looks like a cross between Starship Troopers and Cthulhu. It is thoroughly scary, although I have to say I’m shit scared of tiny jellyfish as well, so I’m not a very good source for animal scariness ratings. In any case, the big ugly fish with the flashlight on its head is the female angler fish. Her hubby is much smaller, and actually much less capable, sort of an evolutionary dead end (feminists rejoice). In fact the only reason males live, is to find females and mate with them (true enough for human males as well).

So when a male finds a female, it bites into her skin and releases an enzyme which digests the skin of his mouth, and the skin of the female. The two are fused together to the blood-vessel level, and then the male slowly dies away, losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes. All that is left is a pair of gonads, basically a pair of balls, which releases sperm when needed. How nice.

This whole process is put extremely well by The Oatmeal (funny comic ensues), where I learned of this phenomenon, and if you are so inclined, you can read the wiki article about angler fish reproduction as well.