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We are starting a new series of articles about historical aspects of design. We are going to use the Design History as source of inspiration. Today our subject will be symbols. We have seen something about them in this article about semiotics. They are present in many aspects of our lives – in traffic signs, small brands, famous brands, urban signaling, etc. Now it’s time to return to the first symbols, in an historical context and see how everything began and evolved to what they are now.

So, let’s start talking about symbols!

Pictograms

A pictogram is basically an image that represents an object due to its resemblance. It doesn’t depend on a specific idiom, because it’s a visual language, recognizable by anyone. It’s commonly used nowadays in signs, instructions, or statistics. Also, the Chinese language is based on pictograms. There are some official pictograms sets like ISO 7001:2007 (“Public information symbols”), laundry symbols (remember that symbols ironing clothing and dry-cleaning on clothes tags? They’re used everywhere) and chemical hazard labels.
See some pictograms samples from National Park Services and other ones used on computers, for Internet or software interfaces.

Rebus

A rebus is the use of an image representing a phoneme of a letter or a word itself. The meaning of the object in the image is not important, what does matters is the sound it represents. It’s largely used as a word puzzle. Take a look at some examples like the IBM logo transformed in a rebus by Paul Rand, the “I Love NY” by Milton Glaser and other that are just for fun.

Ideogram

An ideogram is a symbol that represents an idea or concept. Different from pictograms, they “tell a story”, not only indicates an object. It means they may have or may not have a resemblance to the real object, but mainly, it has a complete meaning.  As examples, the signs bellow, they tell you what to do or what not to do.

Trademarks/Brands

Marks started being used by European traders in the middle ages as a way to identify their products, origins and content. While the term branding started being used by farmers that used iron to mark their animals. You can see both in the example images.

Logotype

A logotype is made of the arrangement of typography creating an unique symbol. The term became “logo” that involves typographical and/or graphic elements.

Printer’s Devices

They are symbols used by printers to identify their productions. There are registers of these symbols since the 15th century. Here is a nice collection from TH Horne’s An Introduction to the Study of Bibliography 1814 and some others randomly found in the database at the George A Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida.

Monogram

It is a symbol created by overlapping or mixing letters, usually initials. They were used primary by monarchs, but now can make beautiful and classy logos.

Coat of Arms & Family Crest

A Coat of Arms is a traditional symbol that was mainly used in the crests of the helmets of knights for identification. Nowadays it’s a symbol of tradition and status. Below there’s the Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom and the Porsche logo.

Hope you enjoyed to see those different kinds of symbols and that many of them are from aforetime, but still known and contemporary. That’s it for now. Next week we’ll talk about type history. Feel free to add any information from your knowledge about symbols and take a look at the further information and source links:

• Design History
• Wikipedia – Pictograms
• Wikipedia – Rebus
• Wikipedia – Ideogram
• Bibliodyssey – Printer’s devices

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Related posts:

1. Semiotics: A Powerful Communication Tool For Designers
2. The evolution type – Part I: Handwritten type
3. The evolution type – Part II: Printed type
4. Creating a logo: The process
5. Logo 101: information, tips and inspiration

Tags:   Graphic Design History9 Comments