The series of symbol language maps has been extended by one important update at the beginning of 2025. This extension was requested by the Palace of Typographic Masonry for the exhibition at Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt. What started with an overview of attempts to universal languages with The Annex of Universal Languages has been refined with a folded poster that maps out twenty attempts to communicate with images rather than scripts. Many of the creators of these systems belief in the universality of images that might bind people rather then divide them. A pasigraphy (from Greek πᾶσι pasi “to all”, “universal and γράφω grapho “to write”) is a writing system that should be able to communicate without much learning effort. The universal ideographic and pictographic symbols are supposed to be understood naturally by people with different cultural backgrounds.

For the first time I brought in a co-artist who provided the illustrations for the map. The multifaceted artist Quenton Miller approached me to help him with his own image-based language system, when I was starting my research for this new extension. Together we created the “Spiral of Babel”, a reconjuring of the failed Tower of Babel, that ended with the division of people through their languages. Quenton created a fitting illustration for each system, sometimes by portraying their creator, other times by mixing their existing iconography or even by connecting both attempts. The spiral peeks in One Universal Language symbolised by a globe with a heart on top, reminding of the globus cruciger, also known as stavroforos sphaira.

Some of the fonts featured on here like Blissymbolics have been featured before. But others like Earth Language and Sitelen Pona are new additions to Fonts in Use.

The full list of contents:
01 — SAFO by Andre Eckart, 1943–1956
02 — Picot by Karl J.A. Janson, 1938–1958
03 — Semantography of Blissymbolics by Charles K Bliss, 1954
04 — LoCoS by Yukio Ota
05 — Language of Space, a UI by Ph.D. John W. Weilgart, 1964
06 — Écriture universelle by Jean Effel, 1968
07 — AAC (Augmented & Alternative Communication), Widgit, PCS and ARASAAC
08 — Symbol Language by Pati Hill, 1977–1978
09 — Worldsign by David Orcutt, 1984
10 — The Elephants Memory by Timothée Ingen-Housz, 1993
11 — Pictoperanto by Jochen Gros, 1993
12 — Zlango – Pic Talk by Yoav Lorch, 2004
13 — Metacom by Annette Kitzinger, 2004
14 — Sitelen Pona by Sonja Lang, 2013
15 — IKON by Cesco Reale, 2015 (2009?)
16 — NOBEL Universal Graphic Language by Milan Randić, 1984–2009
17 — Earth Language by Yoshiko McFarland, 1992
18 — TUQTULI f.k.a. Icon Spell by Juli Gudehus, 2020

The poster can be ordered directly from The Palace of Typographic Masonry or from Bold Monday, the foundry that published the typeface Logical.

The Spiral of Babel, sorting the icons of different language-systems by completeness and potential. The higher on the winding path, the better. This has been done without empirical data but rather by gut-feeling of the two creators.

The layout of the front page, with 18 icons arranged on five lines in a circular shape, is fitting the other three posters of the series. The layout and colours of the first map have been inspired by Adrian Frutiger’s Symbole Zeichen – Wanderung, a map-shaped publication that points to the non-linear nature of its content and invites the reader to wander.

The text page of the map introduces 20 languages wherefrom three have to share one of the 18 panels available. The AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) languages compiled in section 07 are building on top of each other and share many similarities.

Welcome to The Palace of Typographic Masonry, somewhere between the Departments of Sign and Symbol, in The Annex of Universal Languages. Here you will find a small display of attempts to design a visual language that can be universally read, from ideographic systems to all-connecting lingua franca, from utopian alphabets to iconic sign languages.

According to the Bible, the multitude of human languages is a curse. Since the Tower of Babel, there has been division in the world, which led to disagreement, conflicts and war. The language barrier is a sign of human imperfection. To keep man humble, God created scattering. But man did not accept this: for almost 2,000 years, people have tried to undo this curse. If a perfect language, which everyone can understand is invented, perhaps nothing stands in the way of world peace.

Up to the 18th century people searched for a universal language primarily in the past, trying to find the language that Adam spoke, such as Francis van Helmont's ‘Alphabet of Nature’. Since the Enlightenment people searched for that language by looking into the future. A universal language was not meant to arise from an early language form, but could be constructed as an artefact of the human genius. This motivation, for instance, led Charles K. Bliss to make it his life’s work.

Modernism created a stream of rationalized pictogram systems, designed primarily by men with an obsession with the grid. In the digital age, more playful approaches followed, like the expanding symbol language of emojis. Edgar Walthert, the curator of this ‘Annex of Universal Languages’, collected these sources, the result of a deep enthusiasm for visual languages. This personal interest became more public with the release of Logical, a font that contains a rich set of pictograms that can automatically replace words.

The unattainable ideal of the perfect universal language turns out to be primarily a catalyst for even newer forms with which the diversity and richness of the existing patchwork of imperfect languages only grows: that may not be a curse but a blessing.

— Richard Niessen

01 Lingua Igonota by Hildegard von Bingen, sample uses Litterae Ignotae, digitised by WurdBendur.

02 Utopian Alphabet by Thomas More, sample uses XY-Utopian, a part of the Kanji Stroke Order font by Timothy Eyre.

09 Semantography by Charles K. Bliss, sample uses Blissymbolics by Accipiter Media.

11 International SignWriting by Valerie Sutton, sample uses SignWriting by Steven E Slevinski Jr.

17 Emoji by Shigetaka Kurita, sample uses EmojiOne – meanwhile known as JoyPixels.

The backside of the poster is mapping a selection of the most basic symbols to their different meanings. This unveils the fact, that most of these universal symbols are biased towards their creators’ social and historical background.