Pictograph to Typography

Thinking in concepts emerged from thinking in images through the slow development of the powers of abstraction and symbolisation, just as the phonetic script emerged by similar processes out of pictorial symbols and hieroglyphics. A great lesson in communication can be learned from this progression. The evolution of language started with pictures, progressed to pictographs, self-explaining cartoons, to phonetic units, and then to the alphabet. Even though there has be an evolution from pictographs to typography, there are now indications that there is a retracing back to the picture again in design, inspired by the seeking of more efficiency.

Visual literacy cannot ever be a clear-cut logical system similar to language. Languages are made-up systems constructed by man to encode, store, and decode information. Thus, their structure has a logic that visual literacy is unable to parallel.