Read Time: 10 minutes

In 1964, Japanese professor Yukio Ota began work on something audacious: a complete visual language that could be understood by anyone, anywhere, regardless of their native tongue. He called it LoCoS, or “Lovers’ Communication System,” reflecting his hope that readers and writers would communicate “as effortlessly as lovers.” Unlike written languages that represent sounds, LoCoS represents pure concepts. Simple, modifiable shapes. Each symbol builds from base forms, creating a system where once you grasp the foundational elements, related concepts become intuitive.

LoCoS represents the dream scenario for what symbolic communication could become. But as a designer, what fascinates me is this: we’re already building smaller versions of LoCoS every day. Every icon system, every interface language, every wayfinding scheme attempts the same goal: creating visual shorthand that transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries. The trash can on your desktop, the figures on restroom doors, the airplane symbol at the airport. They’re all fragments of that universal visual language Ota was pursuing.

But why do some symbols achieve this remarkable universality while others fail? What makes an icon instantly readable versus confusing? And how can we, as designers, create symbols that genuinely communicate across cultures?

Over the past few years, I’ve been exploring these questions through Carl Jung’s work on symbols and psychology, along with insights from semiotics and the practical wisdom of pioneering designers who’ve tackled this challenge. What I’ve learned has changed how I approach iconography.

The Collective Unconscious and Archetypal Forms

Jung proposed something that sounds mystical at first but becomes practical the more you design: the collective unconscious. The idea is that beneath our individual experiences and cultural differences, humans share deep psychological structures (archetypes) that manifest in recurring symbols across all cultures and time periods. The hero’s journey. The mother figure. The shadow. Light and darkness. These patterns appear everywhere from ancient mythology to modern movies because they’re wired into how we understand the world.

When Jung talked about the collective unconscious, he was describing something designers grasp intuitively: certain images just work across cultures because they tap into shared human experience. Susan Kare proved this when she designed the trash can icon for the original Macintosh in 1984. She didn’t invent a revolutionary new symbol. She recognized that everyone, everywhere, understood the act of throwing something away. The physical trash can was already an archetype, a universal container for unwanted things. Her genius was recognizing that this physical metaphor could translate into digital space.

Jung’s framework becomes useful for icon design here. The most successful icons aren’t arbitrary inventions. They’re recognitions of forms that already exist in our collective understanding. A house means home. A heart means love or favorite. An envelope means message. These aren’t learned associations we have to teach users. They’re archetypal connections we’re tapping into.

But not all concepts have clear archetypal forms. How do you symbolize “settings” or “download” or “share”? Understanding the architecture of symbolic communication becomes crucial here.

How Symbols Actually Work: A Semiotic Framework

While Jung gave us the psychological foundation, semiotics gives us the structural framework for how symbols function. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce identified three types of signs that help us understand why some icons are intuitive while others require learning.

Icons (in Peirce’s sense, not ours) are signs that resemble what they represent. A picture of a camera looks like a camera. Susan Kare’s document icon looked like a piece of paper with text. These work through visual similarity: the signifier looks like the signified.

Indexes are signs that point to what they represent through some causal or associative relationship. Smoke indicates fire. A clock indicates time. The bomb icon Kare used for system crashes was an index. It didn’t mean “bomb,” it pointed to the concept of catastrophic failure through association.

Symbols are signs where the relationship between signifier and signified is conventional. It has to be learned. Letters, numbers, and yes, Kare’s command symbol (⌘) are all symbols in this sense. The looped square she borrowed from Swedish road signs had no inherent meaning to computer users. It became meaningful through consistent application and learned association.

Understanding this triadic structure changes how you approach icon design. When you’re designing for immediate recognition across cultures, you lean on icons (visual resemblance) and indexes (causal relationships). When you’re designing for a specific user base who’ll learn your system, symbols become viable, but they require consistency and repetition.

Lance Wyman demonstrated this with the Washington Metro system in the 1970s. His wayfinding symbols mixed all three types. Arrows functioned as indexes, pointing directionally. Station symbols often used iconic representation: the Capitol dome for the Capitol South station. But the Metro’s “M” symbol itself was pure convention, a learned symbol that gained meaning through ubiquity.

This is what LoCoS does at a systematic level. Ota built a visual grammar where base symbols work iconically (resembling concepts) and then combine through logical modifications to create more complex meanings. It’s a system that leverages both intuitive recognition and learnable patterns.

The Constraint That Creates Clarity

The most iconic symbols in digital design were born from brutal technical limitations. Susan Kare’s original Macintosh icons were constrained to a 32×32 pixel grid, black and white only, on a 72 dpi screen. You couldn’t render photorealistic details at that resolution. You had to think symbolically. The trash can couldn’t have texture or dimension. It had to be a simple silhouette that read instantly. Those constraints forced clarity.

Shigetaka Kurita faced even harsher limitations when he created the original emoji set for Japanese mobile phones in 1999. His canvas? A 12×12 pixel grid. Twelve by twelve. At that resolution, you can’t draw a face with eyebrows and a nose and a mouth with any nuance. You get two dots for eyes, maybe a line for a mouth. That’s it. But that’s also enough, because the human brain is good at recognizing faces, even abstracted ones. Kurita understood that constraint wasn’t the enemy. It was the filter that separated symbolic thinking from decorative detail.

Aicher operated under similar constraints with his Olympic pictograms, though his were conceptual rather than technical. He needed symbols that would work at any size, in any color, across any medium: from tickets to signage to television broadcasts. This forced him toward pure geometry and essential forms. No decorative elements. No cultural specificity that wouldn’t translate. Nothing that depended on color or fine detail.

These constraints mirror what LoCoS attempts: reduction to essential, modifiable forms that can combine and scale while maintaining clarity. When you’re forced to work simply, you’re forced to work symbolically. And symbolic thinking leads to universality.

I’m skeptical of overly detailed, photorealistic icons in modern interfaces. Yes, we have the technical capability for high-resolution, full-color, three-dimensional icons. But that capability doesn’t improve communication. Often, it obscures it. The more detail you add, the more cultural specificity creeps in. The more decoration you include, the slower the cognitive processing. Sometimes the 32×32 pixel constraint, even when artificial, produces better results than unlimited resolution.

Cultural Context: When Universal Isn’t Neutral

Not every symbol needs to be universal from day one. Sometimes consistency and repetition can create new learned symbols. Susan Kare’s command symbol (⌘) is a perfect example. She borrowed it from Swedish road signs, where it marks places of interest: a “looped square” that had no inherent meaning to most computer users. But through consistent application across every Mac keyboard and menu for forty years, it became as recognizable as any “natural” symbol. Today, designers and Mac users recognize ⌘ instantly, even if they have no idea it originated as a Nordic road sign.

This raises an important point: “universal” doesn’t mean “culturally neutral.” Lance Wyman understood this when he designed the Mexico City Metro in 1968. He needed symbols that worked for a largely illiterate population navigating a complex subway system. Rather than imposing purely “universal” symbols, he embedded cultural specificity into the system by incorporating elements of Huichol art and Mexican iconography while maintaining fundamental legibility. Station symbols referenced local landmarks, history, and culture. The genius was recognizing that effective symbols respect local context while maintaining functional clarity.

Roger Cook and Don Shanosky took a different approach when they developed the AIGA symbol signs in the 1970s: the standardized pictograms for public spaces you see in airports, train stations, and buildings across America. They conducted cross-cultural testing, iterating symbols until they achieved high recognition rates across diverse populations. Their telephone symbol, restroom figures, and accessibility icons were designed through systematic research into what communicated versus what designers assumed would communicate.

This testing-driven approach reveals something crucial: our intuitions about universality are often wrong. Symbols we think are obvious aren’t. Gestures that mean one thing in one culture mean something different (or offensive) in another. The “okay” hand gesture. Thumbs up. Even color symbolism varies. What feels universal to us is often just familiar to our specific cultural context.

LoCoS’s systematic approach becomes valuable here. By building from simple, modifiable base forms with logical relationships, it attempts to sidestep cultural specificity. But even LoCoS faces the challenge every constructed language faces: adoption. A symbol system is only as universal as its user base. And getting diverse populations to adopt a new system requires either tremendous utility or institutional backing.

The Practical Application: Building Your Own Symbol System

So how do we apply all of this to actual design work? When you’re building an icon set for an interface, a wayfinding system, or any visual communication challenge, here’s what I’ve learned to consider:

Start with archetypes. Before inventing novel symbols, look for concepts that already have archetypal recognition. Physical objects, universal human experiences, natural phenomena: these form your foundation. Kare’s trash can. Aicher’s running figure. The house, the heart, the star. These work because they’re recognized, not learned.

Understand your semiotic strategy. Are you relying on iconic resemblance (looks like the thing), indexical relationship (points to the thing), or symbolic convention (learned association)? The answer depends on your audience and context. Consumer-facing products lean toward icons and indexes. Professional tools can use more symbolic conventions because users invest time learning the system.

Embrace constraint. Set artificial limitations that force symbolic thinking. Design at small sizes first, even if you’ll display at larger sizes. Work in monochrome before adding color. Reduce detail until you’ve found the essential form that still communicates. The constraint is the tool that reveals the archetype.

Test across contexts. Don’t assume your cultural intuitions are universal. Show your icons to diverse audiences. Test them at different sizes, in different contexts, with different populations. Cook and Shanosky’s AIGA work showed that systematic testing reveals failures before they’re deployed at scale.

Build systems, not collections. LoCoS’s approach becomes applicable here. Individual icons are useful, but systematic relationships between icons multiply their effectiveness. If your “document” icon establishes a visual language (let’s say, a rectangle with a folded corner), then your “image” icon should use that same rectangle with a mountain symbol inside. Your “text” icon uses the rectangle with lines. The system teaches itself through consistency.

Balance learnability with recognition. Some concepts don’t have obvious archetypal forms. “Settings,” “notifications,” “sync”: these are abstract or recent concepts without clear universal referents. That’s okay. Establish these through convention, but make the convention consistent. If a gear means settings in one part of your interface, it means settings everywhere. The bell means notifications. The circular arrows mean sync. Repetition creates learned associations.

Consider cultural context. If you’re designing for global audiences, research cultural symbol variations. If you’re designing for specific local contexts, consider whether cultural specificity might improve recognition and resonance. Wyman’s Mexico City Metro shows that local relevance can coexist with functional clarity.

The Evolution of Symbolic Vocabularies

Kurita’s emoji experienced a similar trajectory. His original 176 emoji for Japanese mobile phones represented a specific cultural context: Japanese communication styles, local foods, cultural references. But when emoji spread through Unicode standardization, they evolved. Apple’s emoji interpretations became influential. New emoji were added to represent diverse skin tones, gender identities, professions. The symbolic vocabulary expanded and adapted while maintaining core recognition.

This is how universal visual languages develop, not through top-down imposition of a complete system like LoCoS, but through organic adoption, adaptation, and evolution of successful symbolic patterns. The icons that work get copied, modified, standardized. The ones that fail get replaced.

But LoCoS reminds us: there’s value in systematic thinking. Kare didn’t design random icons. She designed a coherent visual language with internal logic. Aicher’s pictograms formed a unified system with consistent rules. The AIGA symbol signs work together as a vocabulary, not just individual signs.

When we design icon sets today, we’re engaged in the same work Ota pursued with LoCoS, just at a smaller scale. We’re creating mini-languages with their own grammar, their own logic, their own symbolic relationships. The principles that make LoCoS powerful (base forms, logical modifications, systematic relationships) are the same principles that make any icon system successful.

Why This Matters Now

We’re living through unprecedented global digital communication. Interfaces need to work across languages, cultures, education levels, and contexts. The smartphone in your pocket runs the same operating system whether you’re in Tokyo, Lagos, or São Paulo. The symbols on that screen need to communicate universally, or at least universally enough.

Understanding the psychology and semiotics of symbolic communication isn’t academic indulgence. It’s practical necessity. Every icon you design either contributes to or detracts from universal understanding. Every symbol system you build either respects or ignores archetypal recognition patterns. Every visual metaphor you choose either transcends cultural boundaries or gets lost in translation.

Jung’s collective unconscious tells us that some forms resonate deeper than culture. Peirce’s semiotics tells us how signs function and what strategies work for different contexts. The pioneering designers (Kare, Aicher, Wyman, Kurita, Cook and Shanosky) showed us what these principles look like in practice. And projects like LoCoS remind us of the ultimate aspiration: a universal visual language built on logical, recognizable, modifiable forms.

We may never achieve Yukio Ota’s complete vision of LoCoS as a universal communication system. Language is sticky. Cultural conventions persist. Complete symbolic systems face enormous adoption challenges. But every time we design an icon that works across cultures, every time we build a symbol system with internal coherence, every time we choose archetypal forms over arbitrary invention, we’re building pieces of that universal language.

The trash can still means delete. The heart still means favorite. The house still means home. These aren’t accidents. They’re the result of designers understanding something fundamental about how humans process symbolic information. They’re evidence that universal communication through symbols isn’t just possible. It’s already happening, one icon at a time.

The question isn’t whether we should pursue universal visual communication. We’re already doing it. The question is whether we’ll do it thoughtfully, grounded in psychological and semiotic understanding, informed by the pioneers who came before us, and committed to systematic thinking rather than isolated invention.

That’s the language without letters. And we’re all writing it together.

References

• Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. Dell Publishing, 1964.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.” Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 1955.

Further Reading

• “Icon Design: How to Design Icons Like a Pro” by Nick Babich on UX Planet
• Noun Project: Extensive library showing how designers approach common symbolic challenges

Designers Mentioned

• Susan Kare’s work on the original Macintosh interface (1984)
• Otl Aicher’s pictogram system for the 1972 Munich Olympics
• Lance Wyman’s wayfinding systems for Mexico City Metro (1968) and Washington Metro (1970s)
• Shigetaka Kurita’s original emoji set for NTT DoCoMo (1999)
• Roger Cook and Don Shanosky’s AIGA symbol signs project (1974-1979)