To the designer Susan Kare, designing icons was about solving ‘the little puzzle of making an image fit a metaphor’. Forty ...

For a reliable visual test, it is important to evaluate the legibility of the symbols, which depends on several factors. Previous studies have compared the legibility of Latin optotypes. This study ...

Recent work demonstrates that symbols (e.g., $) are reliably better remembered than their word counterparts (e.g., ‘dollar’). It remains an open question whether the memory benefit observed for ...

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, ...