Visual Arts: Symbols, Icons, Logos and Points of View

Remember from Grade 6

You created motifs, designed fonts to match a message, and made relief prints. You learned to read exaggeration and style as signs in cartoons and masks.

In Grade 7 you will read and design symbols, icons and logos, look more closely at style, and create art about issues, including opposing points of view.

A picture worth a thousand words

Look at your phone or a computer screen. A little house means home. A magnifying glass means search. A trash can means delete. You understand them instantly, without reading a single word.

Artists and designers use pictures that stand for things and ideas all the time. Reading them is a skill, and so is designing them.

Signs, symbols, icons and logos

• A sign gives information or an instruction directly: a red octagon means stop.
• A symbol stands for an idea: a dove with an olive branch for peace, a heart for love, the maple leaf for Canada.
• An icon is a simple picture for a thing or action: a gear for settings, a speaker for sound.
• A logo identifies an organization, team, business or event: your school's crest, a team's mascot logo, a library's logo.

Strong logos and icons are usually simple, memorable, easy to read at a tiny size and work in one colour.

Meaning depends on culture and context

The same image can mean different things in different places. In many Western countries, white is worn at weddings, while in some East Asian traditions white is worn for mourning. A thumbs-up is friendly in Canada but rude in some other countries. When you read a symbol, ask: Who made it? For whom? Where and when?

Wampum: symbols that record relationships

The Haudenosaunee (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora Nations) weave purple and white shell beads called wampum into belts that record agreements and history. Wampum belts are still used and honoured by Haudenosaunee people today.

• The Two Row Wampum has two parallel purple rows on a white background. It is often explained as two vessels, a Haudenosaunee canoe and a European ship, travelling side by side down the same river, each following its own path without steering the other. The white rows are often explained as peace, friendship and respect.
• The Hiawatha Belt records the joining of the original Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, shown by shapes connected by a line. Its design appears on the Haudenosaunee flag used today.

Reading style

Style is the recognizable way an artist, group or culture makes art. Style itself sends messages.

• Pop Art: in 1962, Andy Warhol painted Campbell's Soup Cans, 32 canvases, each showing a can of a different flavour of soup. They look like printed advertisements: flat, repeated and plain. By making art from an everyday product, Warhol made people ask questions about advertising, mass production and what counts as art.
• Kinngait printmaking: Kenojuak Ashevak, an Inuk artist who lived and worked in Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset), Nunavut, made the print The Enchanted Owl in 1960. The owl's feathers spread out behind it in a dramatic burst of bold, flat, decorative shapes. Artists in Kinngait continue to create prints and drawings today, with styles that reflect their own lives, stories and land.

To read style, look for clues: Are shapes flat or realistic? Are lines bold or delicate? Is anything repeated? What materials were used? Then ask what those choices communicate.