Isotype and Graphic Language

As Isotype grew from pictorial statistics into visual education, its icons came to stand for more and more specific parts of human experience. That shift reached education, journalism, advertising and technology, and changed how people communicate in pictures: from desktop to phone, icons became avatars and Unicode symbols became emoji.

The talk traces that line from Otto and Marie Neurath to today’s design systems, where large teams still lean on the same methods for nuanced visual communication. I first gave it at Symbol ’22, the Symbol Group’s online symposium for the 50th anniversary of Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook (7–8 October 2022), and again at Symbol ’24, Icons for Society, at the British Academy in London.