Reading icons and signs

Where

Vienna, then The Hague and England

When

From 1925; named Isotype in the 1930s

Who

Otto Neurath, with the artist Gerd Arntz and Marie Neurath

Otto Neurath ran a museum of society and the economy in Vienna and wanted ordinary people to understand facts about their city. Instead of tables of numbers, his team drew simple, flat figures and repeated them: one little man might stand for a thousand workers, so ten men meant ten thousand. The artist Gerd Arntz drew most of the figures. When the team left Vienna in the 1930s the method was renamed Isotype, short for International System of Typographic Picture Education. This page is from Basic by Isotype (1937), which teaches simple English with pictures.

Where

Tokyo, Japan

When

1964

Who

Art director Masaru Katsumie; sports pictograms drawn by Yoshiro Yamashita

Few visitors to the 1964 Games could read Japanese, so the organisers gave the sports and the main services, such as toilets and first aid, their own picture signs. It was the first time an Olympics used a full, planned set of pictograms. Every Summer Games since has had its own set. Beijing 2008's set was based on ancient Chinese seal script, the writing carved on seals, which is why it looks like brushed black strokes (UCEED 2017 asked you to spot it).

Where

Munich, West Germany; these still hang at the Olympic station

When

1972

Who

Otl Aicher and his design team

Otl Aicher, a co-founder of the Ulm School of Design, led the whole look of the Munich Games: posters, tickets, uniforms and signs. Building on the Tokyo signs, his team drew every figure on a grid, with a round head, a simple body, and limbs set only at right angles or 45 degrees. The result was so clear that it became the model for public signs around the world.

Where

United States, now used worldwide

When

34 symbols in 1974; 16 more in 1979

Who

The US Department of Transportation and the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), drawn by Roger Cook and Don Shanosky

American airports and stations were full of home-made signs that looked different everywhere. The Department of Transportation asked the AIGA to fix this. Its committee collected signs already in use around the world, including Tokyo's and Munich's, scored them for how clearly they read, and then had Cook and Shanosky draw a single family of symbols. Because they were made for the US government, anyone may use them free. The man and woman figures on many toilet doors around the world come from this set.

Where

Used worldwide; this notice is from a building site

Who

International Organization for Standardization (ISO 3864 and ISO 7010)

This one notice uses three kinds of sign. The blue circles are mandatory signs: wear a helmet, goggles, ear protection, boots and a bright vest. The red circles with a slash are prohibition signs: no children, no unauthorised entry, no cars. The yellow triangle is a warning: cameras are watching. Green rectangles (not shown) mark safe things such as exits and first aid, and red rectangles mark fire equipment.

Where

First used at the University of California, Berkeley

When

1946

Who

A team at Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory

The trefoil (three leaves) shows a small circle, the source, with three blades of radiation spreading out. The first signs were magenta on blue; today the standard version is black on yellow. It warns of ionising radiation, from X-ray machines as well as radioactive material. It became an international ISO standard in the 1960s and 1970s.

When

1966

Who

Charles Baldwin, an engineer at Dow Chemical, with the US National Institutes of Health

Laboratories needed one warning for dangerous germs and other biological material. Dow's team drew dozens of designs and tested them on people. Baldwin said they wanted a shape that was memorable but meaningless, so that it would not be confused with anything else and people could be taught what it means. It is a pure symbol: it does not look like a germ at all. UCEED 2015 showed it beside the chemical weapon, radiation and toxic signs and asked you to name each.

Where

This sign is in New Delhi

Who

The Motor Vehicles Act and the Indian Roads Congress guidelines (IRC:67)

India uses three families of road sign, told apart by shape. Mandatory signs are circles, and breaking them is an offence: a red border means something is prohibited (this one bans elephants), and a blue circle gives an order such as "turn left" or "sound horn". Cautionary signs are triangles with a red border that warn of what is ahead, such as a school, a sharp bend or a pedestrian crossing (see the triangle at the back of this picture). Informatory signs are rectangles that give directions, distances and facilities like petrol pumps and hospitals. Two signs have shapes of their own so they stand out: Stop is a red octagon, and Give Way is a triangle pointing down.

When

In the IEC's symbol standard by 1973

Who

Set by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC 60417)

The power button joins a line and a circle. They are usually explained as the binary digits 1 (on) and 0 (off), placed one over the other. Strictly, the broken circle with a line inside is the IEC's standby symbol; a plain line means fully on and a plain circle means fully off.

When

Name proposed in 1997

Who

Named by Jim Kardach of Intel

The wireless technology was named after Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century king who united Denmark and brought Norway under his rule. Kardach had been reading about Vikings and liked the idea of a king who brought warring groups together, just as Bluetooth would join phones and computers made by rival companies. It was meant as a temporary code name, but it stuck. The logo is a bind rune: the old Scandinavian runes for H and B, Harald's initials, drawn on top of each other.

When

1970, for the first Earth Day

Who

Gary Anderson, then a university student in California

The Container Corporation of America, which made boxes from recycled paperboard, ran a design contest for students. More than 500 entries came in, and Anderson won with three arrows that fold like a Möbius strip, a loop with a twist that has only one side, so the loop never ends. The company dropped its claim to own the design, so the symbol is free for anyone to use.

Where

Britain

When

Designed in February 1958

Who

Gerald Holtom, a British artist and designer

Holtom designed it for a protest march from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston at Easter 1958. It joins two letters of flag semaphore, the code of signalling with two hand-held flags: N (both flags held down and out) and D (one flag straight up, one straight down), for Nuclear Disarmament. It became the badge of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Holtom never copyrighted it, so it spread to peace movements everywhere. This 1960s badge shows his early version, with lines that widen towards the edge.

When

Drawn in 1968; adopted in 1969

Who

Susanne Koefoed, a Danish design student; head added by Karl Montan

Rehabilitation International, a disability rights organisation, wanted one sign to mark buildings people in wheelchairs could use. In 1968 a committee picked Koefoed's design, a figure on a wheelchair drawn in lines of equal thickness. Karl Montan, who led the selection committee, added a round head so it would read as a seated person, and the symbol was adopted at the organisation's 1969 congress in Dublin. It is now in the ISO 7001 standard, usually white on blue.

When

Put into email addresses in 1971

Who

Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at BBN in the United States

Long before email, shopkeepers and accountants used @ to mean "at the rate of", as in "5 pens @ 10 rupees". In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent messages between computers on a network, and needed a mark to split a person's name from the name of their computer. He picked @ from his keyboard because it would never be part of anyone's login name, and "name at computer" made sense. That is still how every email address works: name @ place.

Where

Japan

When

Shigetaka Kurita's set, 1999

Who

Shigetaka Kurita, for the mobile company NTT DoCoMo

Emoji is Japanese: e means picture and moji means character. Kurita designed a set of 176 tiny pictures, each on a grid of 12 by 12 pixels, for DoCoMo's i-mode phone internet service in 1999. He took ideas from manga, weather maps and street signs. It is the best-known early set, though historians have since found that a Japanese phone sold by J-Phone had a smaller set in 1997. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added Kurita's 176 emoji to its collection. This heart is a modern design from Twitter's free emoji set.

When

1981

Who

Norm Cox, for the Xerox Star computer

The Xerox Star was one of the first office computers with windows, icons and a mouse. Cox drew a tiny button of three lines that looks like the list it opens, and he had only about 16 by 16 pixels to do it in. It was little used for years, then came back from about 2009, when phone apps needed to hide their menus to save space. People call it the hamburger because the lines look like a bun, a patty and a bun.