Peter Bickford has also worked with Sun and was a member of the Apple Business Systems human interface team and wrote a lot of interesting columns on human interface design. Some might still be left at Apple's site, for instance Users? What Users?.

In "Comics, Icons, and Interface", in AppleDirections of December, 1993, he wrote:

As with human interfaces, perhaps the most powerful technique in comics is the use of icons. Icons are images we use to represent things, whether they're people, places, ideas, or actions. We use them because they provide us with a visual shorthand for what otherwise might be a very complex idea.

[...] In a previous article, I hailed advances in resolution, color, and other technologies that promised to bring more of the "real world" to the world of computers. This seems like a good time to remind folks that we shouldn't confuse information clarity  with information density.

Why are animated features popular despite the ability to portray the same story using today's dazzling film technologies and special effects? Partially because the iconic medium of animated films does away with a lot of the distracting details that get in the way of good storytelling.

And in a column titled "Sound + Vision", in AppleDirections of October, 1994, Bickford wrote about animation:

[...] animations draw much of their power from the fact that they're not realistic. They're really visual metaphors for the actual programs, data, and hardware of our computer's world. For instance, when you see Norton Disk Utilities' "Doctor" putting his stethoscope up to your hard drive to check for bad sectors, nobody (I hope!) believes that there's a little physician inside your computer asking it to lean over and cough. Instead, the animator has reduced these objects down to their basic elements, giving you a better chance to grasp the important aspects of what's going on than if you were observing a video of the real thing. Simply by showing the stereotypical elements "doctor," "stethoscope," and "disk drive," the program gives users the message that a knowledgeable professional is somehow checking out their disk drive (and everything is in good hands).

Bickford recently published "Interface Design: the Art of Developing Easy-to-Use Software" and works with the company Human Computing. Bickford has also designed "ComicBase", a software program for comic book collectors.