Being able to direct the masses with a simple pictogram can be so successful that the simplest of images will resonate with the audience and instant comprehension of the image will direct them to events, washrooms, civil order, and to build IKEA furniture. Artists such as Jean Yves Lemoigne (such as pictured above) have taken a deeply personal look at the pictogram as a way of gentrifying or removing a subject from the lens making it believable that it could be you, your loved one, or an alien instead of the negative human-like shape. Even interior designers use human-like shapes like my client rendering below:

Steven Heller, Art Director for the New York Times, explains the successful, and not so, of the Olympics since 1936 in the video Olympic Pictogram Thru the Ages.

Heller completely missed the official emblem of the 2010 Winter Olympics. I know it hasn’t been seen much, and the designers should have taken it further into more pictograms, but this is not a Bauhaus world anymore and they don’t always convey the visual style of the host city. It should be noted that Quatchi (“kwa – tchi”, not “kachi” as he says) is HUGE here and very much loved by locals and tourists.