Johnathan Kohlhepp
Publication Production II
March 8th, 2017
Symbolism & Iconography
The use of symbols and icons predates human spoken and written languages. In his book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud (1993) defines an icon as “any image used to represent a person, place, thing, or idea.” While a symbol is an “image we use to represent concepts, ideas, and philosophies” (p. 27). He also defines “Icons of the practical realm” as “icons of language, science, and communication” (McCloud, 1993, p. 27). Each of these types of icons have varying degrees of meanings. A representational icon’s meaning is fluid and varies depending on the degree of realism. The second being non-pictorial icons, or as Scott McCloud calls …show more content…
This first came in the form of the American Standard Code for Information Interexchange (ASCII) which is a standard that assigns letters, numbers, and other characters within the 256 slots available in 8-bit code (Computer Hope, n.d.). Slots 0-31 were non-printable codes, 32-127 are considered Lower ASCII and this contains the older American systems. Then there is the Higher ASCII, codes 128-255 which is programable and is based on the language of your operating system, the program currently being used, or for foreign letters (Computer Hope, n.d.). As one may have guessed this system became very limiting very fast as the internet became an international tool and this system only has 256 character slots.
Thus, a new system was established. This new system is the Unicode Standard developed by the Unicode Consortium (unicode.org, 2015). The earliest updated version was released June of 2016, Unicode 9.0 sports a total of 1,114,112 code points (the same as a ‘slot’ in ASCII) with only 267,819 code points being used (BabelStone, 2016). This gives more than enough room to accommodate language variances including a multitude of oriental symbols and everyone’s favorite: the
Publication Production II
March 8th, 2017
Symbolism & Iconography
The use of symbols and icons predates human spoken and written languages. In his book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud (1993) defines an icon as “any image used to represent a person, place, thing, or idea.” While a symbol is an “image we use to represent concepts, ideas, and philosophies” (p. 27). He also defines “Icons of the practical realm” as “icons of language, science, and communication” (McCloud, 1993, p. 27). Each of these types of icons have varying degrees of meanings. A representational icon’s meaning is fluid and varies depending on the degree of realism. The second being non-pictorial icons, or as Scott McCloud calls …show more content…
This first came in the form of the American Standard Code for Information Interexchange (ASCII) which is a standard that assigns letters, numbers, and other characters within the 256 slots available in 8-bit code (Computer Hope, n.d.). Slots 0-31 were non-printable codes, 32-127 are considered Lower ASCII and this contains the older American systems. Then there is the Higher ASCII, codes 128-255 which is programable and is based on the language of your operating system, the program currently being used, or for foreign letters (Computer Hope, n.d.). As one may have guessed this system became very limiting very fast as the internet became an international tool and this system only has 256 character slots.
Thus, a new system was established. This new system is the Unicode Standard developed by the Unicode Consortium (unicode.org, 2015). The earliest updated version was released June of 2016, Unicode 9.0 sports a total of 1,114,112 code points (the same as a ‘slot’ in ASCII) with only 267,819 code points being used (BabelStone, 2016). This gives more than enough room to accommodate language variances including a multitude of oriental symbols and everyone’s favorite: the