By looking at both Mayan graphs and airbnb’s icons and graphs, I realized there are many similarity from the creations to their meanings.
The first thing I realized is their shape, you can really tell that each of the icons or graphs are limited to a certain size, and they are all around to be this big, in my personal opinion, I think the creator trying to make people easy to read, and clearly to determine the meaning behind the icons and graphs.
More than that, let me take an example from Mayans’ glyphs, the spirit and the location or map icon from the airbnb. In the spirit glyph, we can easy to see a circle, some curves and many dots in the right size, circles and curves are somehow just like human’s face, and those dots maybe telling a story of spirit and mind since they are full of ideas and thinkings. On the other hand, the airbnb location icon is made by a beacon and a curved paper or map, the beacon can potentially be considered as the location of something, and the map shows the scale. In conclusion, both the glyph and icon are really start with some objects that can be shown a real life thing then people assume the meaning behind to form a complete glyph and icon that everyone can understand and get used to it.