Nice take on it. What I found out though while trying to do this was that as headlines are already heavily condensed fragments, sometimes it can be very difficult to shrink it down even more. Alot of the time nearly all words are needed to make any sense of it. Thanks for your input.

Jeff,

Wondering if the Chinese can just write headlines like we would write them, but they look like pictures anyway?

Rami,

Nice find. Just wondering how the icons would scale for use on projection areas and large screen displays. Looks a little to rich I think for that. I could be wrong?

Absolutely, Dave. Plenty of potential, and I think Cara’s comment above points in the right direction. I hope you didn’t get the idea that I’m completely dismissing what you’re doing. I think it’s very worthwhile, and I may not have indicated that clearly enough.

Some time ago, I commented here about the pictographic nature of the Chinese language. Maybe we should learn Chinese! It’s really almost exactly what you’re talking about, plus what Cara is saying, plus about a thousand years of functional evolution. So if we subtracted that thousand years and put it in a modern global context …

I think it would be great to get input from someone who is fluent in Chinese, a student of Chinese calligraphy, and understands where you’re going with this. Is any such person reading this?

The plunger and the other symbols up there were just quick sketches that I outlined in Illustrator as an experiment. Some are more immediately recognisable than others I admit, but hopefully having a more thought out symbol, and then using the adjacent symbols to help decipher the headline, users will be able to read/see it.

Some symbols work better than others. Animals for example should be a perfect subject for a pictogram. A cow is a cow no matter what country you’re from. Same for a lion, a tiger, or a rhino. So I think it has some potential.

Plus I think there’s a benefit to having a tricky pictogram in the middle of the headline. For one if there’s a few people standing around trying to work it out then it becomes a common talking point, and forces users to interact to solve it. Two heads, as it were.

Do you suppose the noun for “plunger” in other languages correlates in any way with the verb that describes “plunging” sales? Not likely. It’s idiomatic.

Not that this idea has no merit at all. People love rebus puzzles (and I’m one of those people), but I can’t imagine that such puzzles will ever be a good way to deliver information effectively. Think of it this way: It’s one thing to illustrate a concept with one or more pictures, but to illustrate the actual _words_ that describe the concept removes the audience one more level from the reality being described. Languages have evolved their own kind of precision that will be very hard to replicate reliably in a rebus format, and I seriously doubt that the kind of effort you’re proposing is worthwhile.

But it _is_ fun!

I understand that the same images may not mean exactly the same things to everyone everywhere, but I think the majority of the western world (for which this is intended) will be able to work out what each symbol means, helped along by the other symbols in the headline.

Also, these symbols are quick mockups of what I thought best represented the words. If these went into production for say the BBC, there would probably be a long line of testing and refining of styles and images before they were final.

Not until everyone is implanted with RFID chips will video boards be able to serve an individual experience to an individual user, a la Minority Report.

Thanks for your comment Ana.