Are "Best representation for" questions on topic?

Question

Latest local example: How to portray 'lifestyle' in an app logo

The only similar question I could find in GD Meta is Is "what's the best / most effective / your favourite logo" on topic? but it's not exactly the same. It's about visual representation rather than "the best for".

These type of questions have been discussed (and decided to be rejected) in UX meta: https://ux.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/629/is-it-time-to-put-an-end-to-icon-for-x-questions

I myself asked a similar question regarding a visual representation for an icon ("Time Range", which is rather a complex thing to show in a single icon) and had it closed. I'm not sure how they are treated in GD generally speaking, but I felt there was a limbo in stacks for them, when some are actually closely related to graphic design and to usability. So I'm wondering what's the right approach for us here.

Edit: I remember seeing some very creative discussions here about how to represent concepts in a new way. If valid questions can be answered here, should the UX people be redirecting theirs to us?

Answer 1

I personally don't feel that these questions are a good fit. Following Writers lead, we have allowed subjective questions involving critiques of designs but they're supposed to involve specific criteria. It seems that the "best representation" questions always end up being list/poll/idea-gathering questions which are discouraged.

As a side note, I was going to close "How to portray 'lifestyle'..." as NARQ, but it had close votes on it so I assumed the community would handle it. However, as of this writing it was still open with 3 close votes so I closed it to avoid having broken windows.

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Edit:

Since this answer got accepted, I should probably add a little more context: Most "best representation" questions are too localized can't effectively be answered by the community.

For example, "How to portray 'lifestyle'" will gather different answers from people with different cultures and concepts of lifestyle - and it may likely turn out that none of the answers are useful because the target audience is still a different culture. It's impossible to answer effectively without knowing all those details, and including such time/application-specific details the question becomes extremely localized.

On the other hand, "New generation of Save icon..." is somewhat different. "Save" refers to a specific act that is ubiquitous in software. The meaning of "Save" will not change between cultures and refers to a concrete action.

Even though "Save" is a better question than "Lifestyle", it's still not a good fit for this site. Despite the core action being less culture-specific, introducing new imagery for a well-known action does rely on the culture of the target audience which brings us back to a list of subjective answers. This is very valuable information to designers and the community at large, but it just doesn't fit with Stack Exchange's purpose of having "practical, answerable questions".