From the stop sign to the laugh-cry emoji, symbols play a critical and ubiquitous role in everyday life. A forthcoming exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, “Give Me a Sign: The ...

In this video, Ghana’s best-known contemporary artist, El Anatsui, speaks about the role that language and symbols play in his work. He describes how the abstract nature of West African “adinkra” ...

InvestigationThese yellow pictograms have proliferated and diversified to the point of becoming an indispensable part of our digital communication. Since the first limited set of yellow pictograms, ...

Give Me a Sign examines the fascinating histories behind many of the symbols that instruct, protect, entertain, empower and connect people. Marking the 50th anniversary of the Symbol Sourcebook, this ...

At the very beginning of the “Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols” (1972), the book’s author and one of the era’s most accomplished industrial designers, Henry ...

The symbols we use also have names: dollar sign, treble clef, asterisk, etc. But sometimes the name for a symbol takes on a different sort of meaning, so that it is no longer a name, but a word in its ...

It is easy to minimize the importance of symbols in culture. Art tends to focus on existential symbolism, leap-frogging over the ways in which we interpret symbols constantly, in the form of letters, ...