In Pakistan, where roughly 40 percent of the 240 million people are illiterate, electoral symbols play a crucial role in ensuring voters have a voice in the democratic process. 1 A motorcyclist rides ...

Russian military maps use a visual language of symbols, arrows, units, and fire missions that can reveal how commanders think ...

Symbols surround us everywhere, from the heart emoji we send in texts to the complex iconography in renaissance paintings. They're the visual shorthand that lets artists pack entire stories, emotions, ...

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, ...

Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted. To illuminate one way semioticians look at things, let us peek at stage and film semiotics, which study the ...

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, ...