I used to think hieroglyphics were just pretty bird drawings on museum walls.
Turns out, the ancient Egyptians were solving the exact same design problems we face today when we create icons for airport bathrooms or smartphone interfaces. They needed symbols that could communicate complex ideas instantly, across language barriers, to people who might be illiterate or just passing through. Sound familiar? The 5,000-year-old pictographic system they developed—combining phonetic signs, ideograms, and determinatives—created a flexible visual language that could convey everything from “bread” to “eternal life.” Modern designers at Apple, Google, and the Unicode Consortium are essentially doing the same thing, just with different constraints. They’re building symbol sets that need to work at 16 pixels, in low-light conditions, and somehow make sense to both a teenager in Seoul and a retiree in São Paulo.
Here’s the thing: Egyptian scribes understood semantic layering in ways that would make a UX designer weep. They’d combine a mouth symbol (meaning “speech”) with a book roll to indicate “instruction.” That’s not so different from how we layer a magnifying glass over a document icon to mean “search files.”
The Determinative Principle That Still Runs Your Phone’s Keyboard
Wait—maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
Determinatives were these brilliant little symbols the Egyptians stuck at the end of words to clarify meaning without adding sound. Like, the word for “scribe” would end with a tiny seated man holding a palette, just to make sure you knew we were talking about a person, not the abstract concept of writing. Modern emoji keyboards do exactly this when you type “fire” and get options for 🔥 (actual fire), a fire truck, or someone being “on fire” metaphorically. The system is recieving your phonetic input and offering semantic disambiguation through pictograms. Susan Kare, who designed the original Macintosh icons in 1983, has talked about this tension between literal representation and symbolic abstraction—she couldn’t just draw a realistic floppy disk at 32×32 pixels, she had to capture its essence, the way Egyptian artists captured “bird-ness” with a few decisive strokes.
Honestly, the parallels get weird when you dig into the color conventions.
Why Ancient Color Hierarchies Still Dictate Your App’s Warning Screens
Egyptian artists used red for dangerous or chaotic elements—the desert, the god Set, anything destructive. Yellow-gold meant eternal, divine, imperishable (hence all that tomb gold). These weren’t arbitrary aesthetic choices; they were part of a systematic visual grammar that helped viewers decode complex narratives quickly. Fast-forward to today: every major design system—Material Design, iOS Human Interface Guidelines, Fluent—uses red for destructive actions, yellow/amber for warnings, green for confirmation. We’ve collectively decided that certain color-meaning pairs are somehow “natural,” but really we’re inheriting a symbolic tradition that stretches back to the Old Kingdom, give or take a few millennia of cultural drift and psychological research that basically confirmed what the ancients already knew.
The Rebus Puzzle Living Inside Every Unicode Character
The Egyptians loved a good rebus—using the picture of one thing to represent the sound of another. A checkerboard (“mn” sound) could mean the word “to remain” (also “mn”). This phonetic flexibility let them adapt their symbol set endlessly without inventing new characters for every concept. Unicode does this too, sort of. The 😂 emoji technically means “Face with Tears of Joy,” but people use it for regular laughter, ironic detachment, uncomfortable situations—its meaning shifts based on context, just like hieroglyphic signs shifted between phonetic, ideographic, and determinative roles depending on what surrounded them.
I guess it makes sense that we keep reinventing these solutions.
When Simplification Breaks Down: The Cartouche Problem in Modern Icon Sets
Egyptian scribes would wrap royal names in cartouches—those oval frames that screamed “important person here.” It was visual emphasis, a way to make certain information pop in a dense text block. Designers use badges, notification dots, and colored backgrounds the same way now. But here’s where it gets messy: just like overuse of cartouches would make everything seem equally important (and thus nothing actually important), we’re drowning in red notification badges that have lost all meaning. The hieroglyphic system had built-in constraints—you couldn’t cartouche everything or the whole wall would be ovals. We haven’t figured out those constraints yet for digital interfaces, and it shows.
The Thing Nobody Wants to Admit About Pictographic Universality
Both systems fail constantly. Ancient Egyptians had regional variations, evolving styles, symbols that meant different things in different periods. A hieroglyph from the Old Kingdom might be illegible to someone in the Ptolemaic era, roughly 2,500 years later—about the same time span between us and ancient Greece. Modern pictograms aren’t universal either, no matter how much we pretend. The “save” floppy disk icon is already meaningless to kids who’ve never seen physical media. Cultural context matters: a thumbs-up is positive in the US, deeply offensive in parts of the Middle East. The mailbox emoji looks completly different depending on whether you’re seeing the Apple, Samsung, or Microsoft version, and sometimes those differences actually change meaning.
Anyway, we’re still chasing the same dream the Egyptian scribes had: a visual language that transcends speech, that communicates instantly and beautifully.
We’re just doing it with pixels instead of papyrus, and somehow making a lot of the same mistakes along the way.
