Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Symbols












     Symbols, throughout history, have been diverse and significant in our culture. There are countless symbols and icons, which are especially rampant in today’s society. Symbols can be broken down into categories, such as pictograms, phonograms, ideograms, logos, and trademarks. Pictograms are images that characterize an object, and most symbols can be placed in this category. The Chinese written language completely consists of pictograms, or drawn images. It has 80,000 characters, but only 3,500 are used regularly. A phonogram can be either an image or a particular letter that reads as a spoken sound. One of the most well know symbols, that is a phonogram is the “I Love New York “signage created by Milton Glaser. This particular symbol has been used from the 1970s to present day to elevate New York’s tourism. It has, also, been transformed for many other cities and activities.  An ideogram represents an entire idea by way of images. An example of ideograms would be road-warning signs, such as “falling rocks” which entails a graphic that show rocks falling onto a car from the side of a cliff or mountain.  Another example of an ideogram is the “no smoking” sign, which provide the whole idea of “please, no smoking in this particular area”.  Logos represent brands, while trademarks give authority to the brand. Logotype is a commonly used word for a logo that has nothing but typography to represent it. Some logotypes are the Subway logo, Kool-aid, and Google.  In today’s society logos are seen everywhere, and symbols have become an extremely important element to our civilization.

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