Amsterdammer, born and bred (1944).
Trained as industrial designer but changed to information design. Inspired by the work of Jock Kinneir (British road signs, 1963) he lost his heart on way-finding. Taught at Delft University for over thirty years, which he combined for a short period as designer at Total Design. Started his own office Bureau Mijksenaar (Amsterdam, New York) in 1986 and retired in 2014 but remains active as designer, publicist and consultant. One of his best known publications is Visual Function, a scholarly introduction to information design.

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paul.mijksenaar@gmail.com

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Abstract:

Too many symbols? Limitations, misunderstandings and challenges

Italy, around 1895: cyclist’s association Touring Club Italiano introduces the very first road signs. Other countries soon follow.

 

Rather than to overcome language barriers, road signs were introduced to provide drivers of vehicles that were able to move significantly faster than carriages with instant information and timely warnings.

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In 1934, Viennese economist and sociologist Otto Neurath (1882-1945) designed a visual language called Isotype. Consisting of pictograms, it was intended to transfer knowledge without language barriers. Neurath used it to spread economic knowledge among a large, often uneducated audience. He felt that he would best succeed by enlisting the help of the best illustrators, German artist Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) being the most famous. Neurath’s work, which is kept in the archives of, for instance, the University of Reading and the Haags Gemeentemuseum (the Netherlands), reveals the huge influence Gerd Arntz had and still has on contemporary designers

of symbols.

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After the success of the road signs, the opportunities offered by language-free communication were also recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Since 1948, it has commissioned the design of many sets of beautiful sports symbols for each of its four-yearly Games.

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Next, the Union Internationale de Chemins de fer (UIC) appreciated that passengers travelling by train could really benefit from uniform symbols. Then came a breakthrough initiated by the manufacturers of, among other things, electronics (Philips), white goods (Siemens) and automobiles (Toyota). Companies were especially enamoured by the economic advantages. Using only symbols on their products meant they could sell them anywhere in the world, bypassing the need to store up large quantities of goods per linguistic region. However, the users lost out. They were confronted with hefty multilingual manuals in which they had to look up the meanings of many visual puzzles (and try to remember them).

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But the compactness of symbols turned out to be of great value to product designers. Symbols easily fit on small controls in cars, on mobile phones and on computer screens. Once you know the meaning of the symbols on the dashboard of your own car, you can effortlessly drive off in a

Japanese rental.

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Enthusiasm for symbols is high, especially among designers. The possible uses of symbols appear unlimited. A warning, however, is in order.

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By definition, symbols aren’t self-explanatory but have to be learned. This isn’t a problem for motorists, because they have to study them to pass their driving test. But things are different for users of airports, train stations and hospitals. You can hardly expect this group of users to take a test on symbolism first . . .

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That’s why the people that create symbols – and in many cases these aren’t designers – look for symbols that represent the function they designate in an associative or concrete manner.

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This works in many cases, but unfortunately it fails in even more often. People that don’t know what a diseased kidney looks like won’t recognize the pictogram for the Renal Unit that some hospitals use. People that have never seen a deer before won’t understand the road sign with a picture of a jumping deer on it that presents a warning for crossing wildlife. A boar, a fox or a bear may also pop up in front of your car. Here, the association with a safari park is more obvious . . .

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Symbols work best if they have a visual relationship with concrete and tangible objects in our environment. But they still have to be learned.

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For symbols to develop into an international visual language they must be learned, either by means of instruction or simply by trial and error, something that children are especially good at. In wayfinding, therefore, meaning is often also expressed in text, in support of symbols. It may seem excessive, but it’s very useful to people seeing those symbols for the very first time . . .

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A second aspect that symbol designers have to take into account is the increasing use of electronic devices. More and more often, these are capable of rendering instructions in the mother tongue of the individual user. This means that symbols designed to overcome language barriers are no longer necessary: people can just choose their own language. And as long as spoken and written languages are superior in human communication, the role of symbols is reduced to match their aptitude for compactness. Their sole remaining advantage is that they can be read from a great distance (road signs, way-finding) and that they fit onto very small surfaces (keys, displays)!

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But there is hope, too! Apart from closed series of symbols (road sign and safety symbols) there are millions of symbols that almost everybody recognizes and understands thanks to the Internet. Symbols for card games, for weather reports, cartoon characters, emoticons: too many to mention.

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Detached from their origins, they are used to render all kinds of notions very quickly: a hare and a tortoise for fast and slow, a heart for love, a red cross for emergency services, a cloud for online storage, and keyboard punctuation marks to make a joke or express disappointment. For designers that are aware of limitations on the one hand and opportunities on the other, there is an unlimited future in new symbols.