Care Symbols vs i-mode Emoji
洗濯表示 / iモード絵文字
Both sit in Symbol Systems, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Care Symbols
Four figures, the tub, the triangle, the square and the circle, carry garment care across any border. Washing, bleaching, drying and ironing all compress onto a tag a few millimeters wide, information design worked at the smallest possible area.
i-mode Emoji
One hundred and seventy six pictographs that tell faces, weather and things apart using only the placement of dots on a twelve by twelve grid. Shigetaka Kurita drew them for NTT DOCOMO's i-mode, and MoMA holds the original set.
| Care Symbols | i-mode Emoji | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1958– | 1998-1999 |
| Family | Symbol Systems | Symbol Systems |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Tub, triangle, square and circle / The prohibition X and temperature dots / Compression into millimeters / International standardization | Figures fitted to a twelve by twelve grid / Shapes made of mass rather than of line / Set inline at the size of a letter / Faces, weather and symbols at one coarseness |
| Best used for | Designing handling instructions that must cross every language · Printing instructions for several processes into a few millimeters | Designing signs that must read at the size of a letter as one set on a coarse grid · Telling state by a figure instead of a word where only a few dots can be lit |
| Type | Keep the four base outlines, line weight equal across all of them | Built from masses of dots rather than lines, sized to sit inline at the height of the text |
| Composition | Wash, bleach, dry and iron in that order, evenly spaced in one row | The coarse grid fixed first, every figure told apart inside that one cell |
| Material | Woven or transfer labels whose outlines survive repeated washing | Faces, weather and things held at one coarseness, dots reduced to the limit where they still read apart |
| Caution | Thinning the lines to fit a smaller tag lets dots and crosses clog after washing, and a prohibition gets read as permission. | Chasing fine detail inside the grid clogs the dots, and at the size of the text the figure no longer says what it is. |