Symbol Sourcebook

What It Is

Published by McGraw-Hill in 1972, with a foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller. Henry Dreyfuss was one of the founders of American industrial design: the Bell telephone that sat in every hallway in the country, the round Honeywell thermostat, the Twentieth Century Limited. He spent his last years convinced that graphic symbols were becoming a universal language, and he and his office built a data bank of them that ran to some twenty thousand entries.

The Symbol Sourcebook reproduces around three thousand, sorted by field: traffic, engineering, medicine, meteorology, music, chemistry, folklore, astrology, the ancient and the industrial side by side. There are sections on graphic form itself and on colour. Dreyfuss died in 1972, the year it appeared.

Why It Matters

It is the founding document of the field now called information design, and it was assembled just before that field had a name. Everything downstream inherits its central assumption, that a mark can carry meaning across a language barrier: the AIGA and Department of Transportation pictograms of 1974, the Olympic sign systems, the ISO standards, the airport, the dashboard, and eventually the emoji keyboard.

It also contains an argument, and the argument turned out to be half right, which is more interesting than being wholly right. Dreyfuss believed symbols could be standardised into an international vocabulary. Fifty years on, the airport is his and the phone is not. The icons on your screen are a dialect, not a language: they change every few years, they depend on convention rather than resemblance, and they have to be learned. Research since has been consistently unkind to the idea that pictures explain themselves.

It is also a pleasure to turn: you see the shape of what a civilisation cared about enough to draw.

Be clear about what it is not. It is a 1972 book. Its standards sections have been superseded and nobody should use it as a current reference. The reproduction is small and monochrome, and the taxonomy is idiosyncratic in places. It survives as a designer's sourcebook and a historical document.

Before You Read

An hour to understand what it is. Then years of returning to it, which is how this book is actually used.

Bring a project. The Sourcebook comes alive when you have something to design and a decision to make, and browsing it cold is pleasant but weightless.

Read Fuller's foreword. It is short, and it states the ambition the symbol pages themselves cannot: that this is an attempt at a common language for a species which had just seen itself from space.

Then start with the field you know best. Look at the symbols you use without thinking, and see when and by whom they were fixed. It is a strange feeling.

Which Edition to Read

• The Wiley paperback reprint — recommended. The complete 1972 content, in print, at a price that lets you keep it on the desk rather than the shelf, and the desk is where it belongs. The cost: the printing is serviceable rather than crisp, and the finest linework loses its edges. View on Amazon →
• The Van Nostrand Reinhold reprint. The intermediate edition, very common secondhand and often cheaper than the Wiley. The cost: identical content, no advantage beyond price, and the same reproduction problems.
• The McGraw-Hill first edition, 1972. The original, and a beautiful object: larger, properly printed, the symbols reproduced at a size where you can see the drawing rather than the idea of the drawing. This is a designed book about design, and it shows. The cost: collectors have found it, and it is priced as a piece of design history now.

Buy the Wiley to use and hunt the McGraw-Hill first edition to own. The best working copy and the best object are not the same book here.

Dreyfuss's Designing for People and The Measure of Man are the other two legs of the same table, and anyone taken with the Sourcebook will want them.

Getting the Most From This Book

Use it. Do not read it.

Then break that rule once and go to the sections furthest from anything you do: meteorology, alchemy, laundry care, music. The symbols you cannot read are the ones that teach you what a symbol is actually doing when it works.

And notice how few of the three thousand you can read cold. That gap is the book's real subject and the quiet refutation of its own thesis, and Dreyfuss, who was a serious man, would have wanted you to see it.

Set it beside the 1974 AIGA pictograms to see what happened next, and beside your phone to see what happened after that.

The commonest mistake is to treat it as a standards manual, which it no longer is, or as a coffee-table book, which it never was. It is a museum and a toolbox in one binding.