Symbol Systems
Every set here was designed with a particular reader in mind, whether that reader identifies a household, signals to another ship, reads by fingertip, or is a scanning machine.
Dictionary entry
- Adinkra 19th century– / Style
The Akan compressed their proverbs into figures and stamped them onto cloth with gourd blocks. One shape carries one thought, which makes the set a working graphic language.
- i-mode Emoji 1998-1999 / Style
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.
- Kamon Heian period– / Style
Japan's crest system that geometrizes plants, animals and objects with compass and line alone. Some twenty thousand patterns designed in black-and-white reversal completed the scalable mark centuries before logo design.
- Heraldry 12th century– / Style
Europe's armorial system, born from the need to tell one man from another on the battlefield. Exact description in the language of blazon, the rule of a limited set of tinctures and a grammar of division and combination add up to a design system that has run for 800 years.
- Braille 1824– / Style
A tactile writing system Louis Braille designed at fifteen, giving every letter a two-by-three cell of dots. Sizing that cell to a single fingertip is a rare case of ergonomics and typography arriving at the same answer.
- Signal Flags 1857– / Style
The flag system for spelling letters and set phrases at sea. High-contrast geometry chosen solely for distant legibility became a masterpiece collection of abstraction born from function.
- Care Symbols 1958– / Style
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.
- Alchemical Symbols medieval–18th century / Style
The signs that recorded substances and operations between secrecy and sharing. The system binding planets to metals vanished into chemical notation, but survives as the graphics of mystery, quoted to this day.
- Proofreading Marks 16th century– / Technique
A sign language that corrects a typeset page through dialogue with its margins. The back-and-forth of deletion and stet, and the Western dele, were refined alongside the history of printing into an editing protocol that stands behind every typeset work, this dictionary included.