Two graphic designers comb through thousands of years of iconography in a new handbook for understanding visual language. In 1914, the cat represented police oppression of women’s suffrage. Today, it ...

It is easy to minimize the importance of symbols in culture. Art tends to focus on existential symbolism, leap-frogging over the ways in which we interpret symbols constantly, in the form of letters, ...

In learning to read, squiggles and lines transform into letters or characters that carry meaning and conjure sounds. A trio of cognitive neuroscientists has now mapped where that journey plays out ...

A logo -- a small symbol or design used in business marketing -- is usually one of the first visual symbols a company develops in the early stages of planning. It often follows the naming the business ...

Chiqui Esteban is the Deputy Director for Art, Maps, and Graphics at National Geographic magazine. Data Points is a new series where we explore the world of data visualization, information graphics, ...

China’s government, for instance, prohibits social media posts referencing June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown that killed an unknown number of Chinese pro-democracy ...