
How the Universal Symbols for Escalators, Restrooms, and Transport Were Designed - dnetesn
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-universal-symbols-for-escalators-restrooms-and-transport-were-designed
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WalterBright
The icon thing has bugged me since its appearance on the Mac:

1\. Companies tend to copyright them, rendering a universal set impossible. At
least these universal symbols are not copyrighted.

2\. If you don't know what they mean, there's no way to find out.

Take the universal symbols (though not in that list) for on and off: | and O.
I still cannot remember which is on and which is off. I can't find out,
either, without googling for it. With the words "on" and "off", I know what
they mean.

And more importantly, if I do not know English, I can trivially look up "on"
and "off". Why is "|" as a symbol better than "on" as a symbol?

Why is "Helvetica Man" inherently better than "men" and "toilet"? Knowing
English is not necessary to recognize the words "men" and "toilet" with just
as much facility as having enough savvy to remember that a silhouette of a man
means "mens toilet".

Back in 1985, an Apple salesman showed up at our company to sell us on Macs.
Part of his spiel was passing around a sheet of paper with icons on them and
asking us what the icons meant. None of us had used a gui before, and he was
bitterly annoyed that we guessed wrong on nearly all of them. The one I
remember most we decided represented a box of Kleenex. (That one was the
'print' icon.) The air went out of his presentation after that.

The idea there was that there was something wrong with using English words,
like "print". A phonetic language really is a great advance. Words can be
looked up in a dictionary. Where are icons looked up (especially if they are
different on every system due to copyrights)?

Is learning a dozen standardized English words really harder for someone who
knows no English than learning a dozen icons?

When I use a gui app, I still have to hover over the icon that somebody got a
design award for (sarcasm!) hoping that the coder saw fit to add a tooltip so
I know what it does.

~~~
datenwolf
> And more importantly, if I do not know English, I can trivially look up "on"
> and "off". Why is "|" as a symbol better than "on" as a symbol? > > Why is
> "Helvetica Man" inherently better than "men" and "toilet"? Knowing English
> is not necessary to recognize the words "men" and "toilet" with just as much
> facility as having enough savvy to remember that a silhouette of a man means
> "mens toilet".

For one simple reason: If you know them, they're far quicker to read. Take
road traffic for example. Everytime I visit America I notice how much more
efficient clean, distinct symbols are: Practically _everything_ is conveyed by
written out words "Speed Limit", "No Parking", "No right turn on red", "No
U-Turns" and so on. Such signs require, that I read and parse them. In fact,
if one understands English it's probably taking longer to recognize a sign,
because several functional units in your brain try to take precedence on the
interpretation.

In Europe we have very distinct symbols for each and every traffic regulation.
The effect of this is that you can read them very quickly (it happens almost
unconciously) and more importantly it even works if you glimpse them only in
the periphery of your vision.

~~~
WalterBright
I agree that once you know the European traffic symbols, they require less
cognitive effort.

Once you know what they are. You might think they are all obvious, having
grown up with them. But they aren't. I went to Germany when I was 9, and they
most assuredly are not intuitively obvious.

Ironically, I was told that the European traffic symbols came about because
the Europeans could not agree on which language to use. The only exception was
they adopted the U.S. "STOP" sign.

~~~
chias
They aren't intuitive to those of us who grew up with them either, nor are
they meant to be. You learn them, though, if you want a license.

It's not easy and is super frustrating and arbitrary when you're first going
through them in preparation for your test. But if you want a license, you do
it. And then you know them.

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epmatsw
Link to the full set of symbols, if anyone else is interested:
[http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/](http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/)

~~~
ggchappell
Thanks!

Note, FTA:

> They changed one of the three male figures riding in an elevator to a female
> figure.

In the link you posted, the three figures in the elevator are all Helvetica
Man. OTOH, the "nursery" symbol is a baby, not a bottle. So it's not the
original symbol set, but it might not be the most up-to-date, either.

EDIT. The "exit" symbol is interesting. It's a circle split vertically. I
don't recall ever seeing that before. (Or perhaps I saw it, but had no idea
what it meant.)

~~~
jonsen
I've seen the Exit symbol. It was green as opposed to the red No Entry.

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TazeTSchnitzel
The AIGA symbols are interesting in the biases they encode.

The symbol for "man" is the outline of an adult human. The symbol for "woman"
is the outline of an adult human, but wearing a dress. So, male is considered
the default. Masculinity is the absence of femininity.

The symbol for "toilets" is the symbol for "woman" (an adult human with a
dress) next to the symbol for "man" (an human), with a dividing line between
them. We heavily associate toilets with sex segregation, apparently.

They also show their age: the symbol for currency conversion lacks the Euro
and instead has a French franc!

~~~
dragonwriter
> The symbol for "man" is the outline of an adult human. The symbol for
> "woman" is the outline of an adult human, but wearing a dress. So, male is
> considered the default.

I'm pretty sure the intent is that the symbol for "man" is the outline of an
adult human wearing pants and a shirt -- that the variations like "arriving
flights" and "customs" aren't, respectively, a nude figure with a brief case
and a nude figure with a load-bearing belt inspecting luggage. If you want to
critique the bias, its not "male as default", its "current gender-
stereotypical clothing as the distinguisher between genders".

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Where did I ever say they were an unclothed person?

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unwind
Being a fairly recent parent, on a weekend trip abroad I was annoyed to learn
that for some users (this was in otherwise-awesome Amsterdam's Schiphol
airport), the "baby bottle" icon doesn't imply that facilities to actually
heat baby food are present.

I felt like all it meant was that a baby-changing table was installed, which
really has very little to do with feeding the baby. The two uses are
temporally separated (most times).

We ended up going to a café and asking them instead, which of course worked
fine but was more costly since it guilted us into having something too. :)

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theandrewbailey
I've been a fan of a webcomic that is nothing but these symbols (and others
like them). It looks like XKCD, but with a more machined look.

[http://www.systemcomic.com/](http://www.systemcomic.com/)

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Jun8
What would be a good symbol for innovation, other than a lightbulb? For
makerspaces?

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marknadal
I've been to 25ish countries and the bathroom symbol is not universal.

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ape4
These symbols are so successful. I'd like to to see sets of symbols for some
other areas.

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rbrogan
It is interesting how the designers were not themselves authoritative.

~~~
rdancer
Go on?

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wodenokoto
What was the problem with the baby bottle?

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rdancer
If you go to a feeding room, you're going to breastfeed, not bottle-feed. If
the DoT don't want have tits in the pictogram, that's fine, but a bottle is
not representative of the activity.

Babies are normally breast-fed, and should be breast-fed. Breastfeeding is one
of the most important activities of motherhood. The bottle represents an
unnatural and less-than-ideal replacement, and insults and cheapens mothers.

That's my take on the contemporary arguments. Modern arguments would have a
slightly different feminist spin ;-)

~~~
x1798DE
This is a kind of weird objection. No one thinks about anything other than
feeding a baby if you show them a baby bottle. No one would know what you were
going for if you just had a glyph of tits, and anything more precise would be
needlessly complicated.

~~~
rdancer
Tits are nude beach; this would be a baby feeding on a teat, something like
this[1].

[1] [http://imgur.com/QOwxiHp](http://imgur.com/QOwxiHp)

