A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures
I came across this article via Daring Fireball.
In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto “A word is worth a thousand pictures.” This still holds true. Unfortunately, the labels for Dock icons don’t appear until the mouse passes over them. A user looking for one of six Word documents must scrub the mouse back and forth along the length of the Dock until a particular label appears.
The last sentence is just as true for folders. And that’s exactly why I wrote FolderBrander. It lets me quickly place a short text label over a folder icon. Check it out.