When is a letter worth a thousand pictures?

The implications of the letterforms that form our modern Latin alphabet have long been lost to us. Still, their sounds and their communication remains locked in our collective subconscious to enable us to help us to communicate, convey meaning, share our emotions and discuss our values. 

An ancient Egyptian might well have found it easier to communicate today reading an emoji text than a referring to The Rosetta Stone for an exact translation.

These two picture-based alphabets would at first seem to have little to do with the Roman alphabet. However, the Roman alphabet is a picture-based system, emerging from Egypt and Sumer, probably by way of the Phoenicians to Greece and then on to Rome. The meanings of some of the letters are apparent and easy to read and understand as pictograms from their original forms. The letter M, for example, is easily understood as standing for water, and the letter O for the abstraction of the eye, they can be explained simply to the modern reader.

However, many of the other letterforms have far more obscure origins and emotional meanings, and this is where they may converge back towards hieroglyphs and emojis, as they can convey emotions or a sense of something beyond the pictorial representation. Emojis are now the living alphabet of our communication, with new ones being added to the global digital character set every few months and in turn our phones operating systems.

Elderly relatives revel, childlike, in the fun they bring to text communication and share, sometimes inappropriately, strings of symbols that convey their feelings and joy of being freed from the constraints of the prescriptive system of rules that surround the grammatical use of words and letters in the traditional alphabet, helping them to communicate better with their millennial offspring. Nobody wants to be left behind, so they update their software to allow access to the latest symbols.

This way of communicating has long been understood by brand designers looking to embody their symbols, logos and logotypes with meaning and relevance to audiences. Their symbols help companies to represent the emotions and values that would otherwise be lost in a simple description of the product or service that is being provided. Brands too have become a picture-based writing system, offering comfort, guarantees, security and understanding to audiences quickly in a short-hand that is understood and in many instances cherished. Brands like Apple, Nike, McDonald's and increasingly Amazon have dropped the words from their branding, preferring to communicate with their symbols only. It could be argued that this takes time, effort and money to achieve this level of recognition. However, given that the world craves the simplicity of symbols, it could equally be argued that not communicating in this way slows your message down.

This convergence to understanding the world in short-hand may have in part come about due to the internet, and the prevalence of smartphones, who's icon-based application systems are almost entirely international in their communication. You no longer need to know the word for the object in the icon, or in the menu, to understand its meaning. Many concepts can be described in pictures, which makes them intelligible to anyone in any language.

Future communication may be to return to a universal picture-based system that is represented by hieroglyphs, emojis and symbols that everybody understands and that convey the emotions of the author, supported by the words and the language we use already. Brands should be mindful of the need to be understood at a symbolic level, so what do you stand for?