Pictograms and their Effectiveness: from the Egyptians hieroglyphs to emoticons

Abstract

The necessity to communicate encouraged the prehistoric man to develop technology to tell their story to subsequent generations, appearing thus the first representative signals of everyday life. After centuries, this reproduction process of learning was being improved until we get to modern writing. In this article, we tried to stick to the knowledge of symbols and the creation of pictograms and their effectiveness in various application contexts, considering concepts of rationality and objectivity of the Positivist philosophy postulated by Otto Neurath, founder of the modern Isotype system pictographs (International System of Typographic Picture Education) and its application in the educational field. Still, they are considered the cognitive processes for creation and interpretation, in which designers and users should be immersed in the same repertoires to make an affect communication. The study generated a reflection on the effectiveness of symbolic communication in light of these processes, motivating us to draw parallels between the current communication through pictograms and emoticons with the old hieroglyphs developed by the egyptians.