Year: 2020

In the history of human civilization, the use of hieroglyphics can be counted as a tremendous discovery of the human race. It can be traced back to the time when the human was originally evolved from apes. In the past, the idea of hieroglyphics served as symbols, which was an essential way to communicate with…

Icons can be seen everywhere these days like we see when traveling, whether it be of street signs that warn us of entering school zones to airports with signs guiding us to certain areas.  But in the digital world, the use of icons is a necessity to help navigate within a website or an application…

Our ancestors created the writing system by inventing diverse techniques like drawings, symbols, and logograms. The purpose of innovating these fascinating methods was for our ancestors to vividly document our stories and communicate in a better and more proficient way. Whether it’s Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mayan pictographs, or Chinese calligraphy, the outcome of each writing system…

Each clan and tribe chooses an animal or natural object that it believes to have a special and mysterious relationship with it as a special mark of the clan or tribe. At first, people engraved totems on the living ground and labor tools. Later, they were used as symbols of wars and sacrifices to icons…

Pharaoh Namur’s armor joint plate should be the earliest hieroglyphics. At that time, people did not have the vocabulary that is now flooded. The only way to leave a cultural imprint is to abstract concrete things, so it also forms itself. A culture. Compared with the Sumerian alphabet and Mayan pictography, Egyptian hieroglyphics is closer…

Modern icons convey meanings through the pictorial resemblance of the physical objects, the same method practiced back to 3200 B.C. by Egyptians. Although the subject of matter may be different due to the advance of technology, the idea behind the approach remains the same throughout thousands of years in the history of writing.  It wasn’t…

Humans in order to recognize, express, and exchange information with a more convenient method, a series of graphs and symbols with referent meanings were invented which we called Pictographic language. The pictographic language was invented and developed between the 31st century BC and the 2nd century AD. Now, designers in order to reduce the learning…

Before language developed to the point it is today allowing humans to express themselves using groups of letters, ultimately creating words, eventually forming sentences on to paragraphs finally opening the space for works from Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison. In early forms of writing such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics humans communicated more similarly to the emoji’s…

“[T]his invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of learners, with the neglect of their memory, because their trust in writing comes from strange external marks and not their own internal recall.,” King Thamos to the Egyptian God, Thoth. King Thamos was afraid that writing would replace memory since we have to rely on writings…

It was a profound step in history for human beings to transfer their thoughts into communicable mediums. During the prehistoric period, our ancestors interpreted what they saw and orally transmitted information in a written format that could be traced back to the beginning of 3200BC. Back in the early Bronze Age, around 3200BC in ancient…

In Relation to Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs With the development of mass media, the icons of applications are With the development of mass media, the icons of applications are becoming more and more similar. The main reason is that designers should make sure that they don’t misunderstand users. However, in recent years, some new applications with…

The foundations of iconography can be traced back to Ancient Egypt. At that time, people used  Egyptian hieroglyphs which combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters to communicate with each other. In this blog, I want to compare the icon of nowaday application(VoiceThread) with the Egyptian hieroglyphs and see if there is any commonality between these…

Crunchyroll is an anime streaming app. I chose Crunchyroll because they use symbols to represent the various genres of shows that they offer which are different from that of any other streaming service I’ve seen. The action genre is represented by a symbol of fire because of the heated battles and intense journey’s. Romance uses…

Pictographic language was developed across different cultures from the 31 century bc and slowly evolves to a full writing system. Now, with the developments of smartphones and other devices UI icons appears to be symbols that communicates just like pictographs. I choose an app from my phone named Health and find some interesting similarities and…

Soundcloud is a music streaming and sharing service where members can create an account to listen, upload, and share their favorite songs. Within the Soundcloud application the use of icons to represent different pathways of musical exploration is plentiful. Many times an icon is used in place of text such as in the menu of…

In many ways, the foundations for modern day iconography and logos can be traced back to as early as 5000 BCE, or the eras in which cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and cave paintings first surfaced. What we know as ‘writing’ today went through a myriad of transformations, but started off in a familiar form: pictographs. Much of…

The app I chose is “LINE.” One of the famous communication apps in east Asia and southeast Asia. The similarity between those ancient times languages and icons on “LINE” is they both try to make products or elements in the real world into simple graphics. And I think LINE icons are much similar to Egyptian…

Even with well-written languages and phonetic words in this digital world, we are already programmed to learn and understand the symbols and ideographs that existed thousands of years ago. In this blog entry, I want to focus on comparing some music-control buttons on Samsung Music to the Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sumerian logographs. Traveling through time,…

The app I decided to choose with many icons is Snapchat. The icons and buttons I find interesting featured in the app include: map, camera, friends, and texting. These buttons take after the sumerian alphabet’s approach of simple yet explanatory. The sumerian alphabet is best compared to the app I chose because of its simplistic…

I chose Xbox app as it has a variety of Icons. Among them, I selected ‘pins’, ‘search’, and ‘achievement’ as one group, and ‘settings’ as another. Compared to Sumerian, which has included the whole syllable and read as logographs or syllables, the icons on the Xbox app are ideographs which symbolise the idea and concept…