ImaginGraphic - Pictograms

Pictograms was introduced in the 1930s by the Viennese political economist,  museum director Otto Neurath    and his wife, Marie Reidemeister. Pictograms was first known as "The International System of Typographic Picture Education," and as the Isotype. Isotype was originally designed as an alternative to text, a starkly graphic means of communicating information about locales, events, and objects on one hand; and complex relationships in space and time on the other.

Neurath believed that Isotype, formed of pictograms, icons, or symbols, could be the world's first universal pictorial language. Neurath also had a school which was called the Neurath's Vienna School, which was rooted in a simple graphic vocabulary of silhouetted symbolic representations of every possible image, from men and women to dogs and cats to trucks and plane.

Neurath's work influenced the cartographic and information graphics of his day and well into the late twentieth century. It also influenced pictograms that are used in airports, transportation hubs, and at large international events.