Pictogram
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to a considerable extent pictorial in appearance. A pictogram may also be used in subjects such as leisure, tourism, and geography.
Pictography is a form of writing which uses representational, pictorial drawings, similarly to cuneiform and, to some extent, hieroglyphic writing, which also uses drawings as phonetic letters or determinative rhymes. Some pictograms, such as Hazards pictograms, are elements of formal languages.
Pictograph has a rather different meaning in the field of prehistoric art, including recent art by traditional societies and then means art painted on rock surfaces, as opposed to petroglyphs; the letters are carved or incised. Such images may or may not be considered pictograms in the general sense. A pictograph is a pictorial symbol for a word or phrase. Pictographs were used as the earliest known form of writing, examples having been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia from before 3000 BC. In other ways it is a pictorial representation of statistics on a chart, graph, or computer screen.
In easy words a pictogram is a simple drawing that represents something. Pictograms were used as the earliest form of writing.
Usage notes
Strictly speaking, a pictogram represents by illustration, an ideogram represents an idea, and a logogram represents a word: Chinese characters are all logograms, but few are pictograms or ideograms. Casually, pictogram is used to represent all of these: it is a picture representing some concept.
Modern uses
An early modern example of the extensive use of pictographs may be seen in the map in the London suburban timetables of the London and North Eastern Railway, 1936–1947, designed by George Dow, in which a variety of pictographs was used to indicate facilities available at or near each station. Pictographs remain in common use today, serving as pictorial, representational signs, instructions, or statistical diagrams. Because of their graphical nature and fairly realistic style, they are widely used to indicate public toilets, or places such as airports and train stations. Because they are a concise way to communicate a concept to people who speak many different languages, pictograms have also been used extensively at the Olympics since 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, designed by Masaru Katsumi, and are redesigned for each set of games.
Pictographic writing as a modernist poetic technique is credited to Ezra Pound, though French surrealists credit the Pacific Northwest American Indians of Alaska who introduced writing, via totem poles, to North America.
Contemporary artist Xu Bing created Book from the Ground, a universal language made up of pictograms collected from around the world. A Book from the Ground chat program has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.
Pictograms are used in many areas of modern life for commodity purposes, often as a formal language (see the In mathematics section).
See also
- Asemic writing
- Chinese character
- Chumash Rock Art
- Crop art
- DOT pictograms
- Emoticon
- Icon (computing)
- iConji (social networking)
- Ideogram
- Pecked curvilinear nucleated
- Petroforms
- Petroglyph
- Rebus
- Rock Art
- Writing system
- Yakima Indian Painted Rocks
