[NoZebra120vClip]

Around 2015, I authored my résumé in LibreOffice, and I sprinkled in an assortment of bullet points. Some were indented. I used open squares, filled squares, open and filled circles, right-arrows, stars, etc.

I brought it into an employment center for critique, and my mentor informed me that those shapes all had different meanings and functions. It was a wake-up call for me.

I am not a UX/UI designer, so my experience with the UI elements in applications had been intuitive, and moreover, disconnected from the activity of authoring a non-interactive document.

So I believe that these UI features were imitating paper-based forms. Those ovals or circles on Scantron sheets: you'd better not fill in more than one per line! And being named "radio buttons": yes, if you pressed "AM" then the "FM" button popped out. If you had six presets in a car--wait a minute, those were oblong...

[teddyh]

> my mentor informed me that those shapes all had different meanings and functions.

I have never heard of this. It sounds dubious, like those “flower language” lists which are all different.