I used to think ancient writing systems were just museum pieces—beautiful, sure, but irrelevant to anything happening in a modern design studio.
Then I spent an afternoon with Carlos Mendoza, a brand designer in Mexico City who keeps a battered copy of Michael Coe’s Breaking the Maya Code on his desk, pages dog-eared and covered in Post-it notes. He was working on a logo for a sustainable coffee company, and he kept flipping between his Illustrator file and photographs of stelae from Copán. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to a glyph that combined a jaguar head with geometric borders. “They weren’t trying to make it simple. They wanted density, layers of meaning packed into one visual space.” The logo he was designing did something similar—a coffee bean that doubled as a leaf, wrapped in linework that suggested both topographic maps and traditional weaving patterns. It was a mess of ideas, honestly, but somehow it worked. Mendoza explained that Mayan scribes operated under different assumptions than we do now: they expected viewers to spend time decoding, to discover secondary and tertiary meanings. Modern minimalism tells us to strip everything away until only the essential remains, but what if—wait, what if the essential is the complexity?
When Symmetry Becomes a Storytelling Device Rather Than Just Balance
Here’s the thing about Mayan glyphs: they’re almost aggressively symmetrical, but not in the boring way we usually think about symmetry. Epigraphers like David Stuart have documented how scribes would mirror elements vertically and horizontally within a single glyph block, creating what looks like visual rhythm. Contemporary designers have started borrowing this approach, not just copying the aesthetic but adapting the underlying principle. I’ve seen it in tech startup logos, oddly enough—companies that want to signal both precision and creativity. The symmetry provides instant recognizability (crucial when your logo needs to work as a 16×16 pixel favicon), but the internal complexity gives people something to discover on second and third viewings.
Take the rebrand that studio Athletics did for a biotech firm in 2023. The mark combined radial symmetry with organic, almost glyph-like internal divisions. The designer told me—though I’m paraphrasing from a podcast interview, so grain of salt—that she’d been studying how Mayan day signs balanced geometric precision with representational imagery. “They could make a rabbit look like a rabbit while still fitting it into a perfect square,” she said. “That’s incredibly hard.” The biotech logo doesn’t depict anything literal, but it has that same quality of structured wildness.
Modular Construction Methods That Predate Digital Grid Systems By Roughly Fourteen Centuries
Honestly, the first time someone explained Mayan glyph construction to me, I thought they were describing a primitive version of vector graphics.
The scribes worked with a standardized set of components—head variants, full-figure variants, geometric affixes—that could be combined and recombined to create different meanings while maintaining visual consistency across texts. Sound familiar? It’s essentially the same logic behind modern logo systems, where a primary mark gets broken down into modular pieces that can be rearranged for different contexts (app icon, horizontal lockup, stacked version, etc.). Simon Martin’s research on Mayan writing describes something called “conflation,” where multiple semantic elements merge into a single composite glyph. Designers now call this “icon fusion” or “mark synthesis,” but the cognitive principle is identical. You’re asking the viewer’s brain to parse multiple information layers simultaneously, which—when done right—creates a sense of depth and sophistication. When done wrong, it just looks muddled. The Mayans figured out the boundaries of this technique about 1,400 years before we started debating it in design school critiques.
Why Hand-Drawn Irregularity Now Signals Authenticity Instead of Sloppiness in Professional Branding Contexts
I guess it makes sense that we’d eventually get tired of geometrically perfect logos.
Mayan glyphs, even when carved in stone, retain traces of the human hand—slight asymmetries, variations in line weight, organic curves that don’t quite match from one iteration to the next. For decades, this would’ve been considered unprofessional in corporate identity work. But lately, brands are actively pursuing that hand-drawn quality, and they’re often looking to ancient writing systems for permission, almost. If scribes creating sacred texts for divine kings didn’t worry about perfect uniformity, maybe it’s okay for a craft brewery or a boutique hotel to embrace slight irregularities too. The designer Jessica Hische mentioned in a 2022 interview (I think it was Eye magazine?) that she’d been studying pre-Columbian writing systems to understand how letterforms could feel both authoritative and warm. “There’s a confidence in the imperfection,” she said, or something close to that. The wobble isn’t a mistake—it’s evidence of human creation, which in our current cultural moment reads as more trustworthy than algorithmic precision. Whether that’s actually true or just good marketing, I honestly can’t say. But the influence is definately there, showing up in logotypes that deliberately recieve hand-drawn elements into otherwise clean designs, creating a tension that feels, for whatever reason, contemporary.
Anyway, the Mayans probably weren’t thinking about brand differentiation when they developed their writing system. But they were thinking about visual communication, about how to pack maximum meaning into constrained space, about balancing standardization with expressiveness. Turns out those are the exact problems facing logo designers today.
