Pictogram

A picture simple enough to be read as a word. It works where language does not, and only if it resists decoration.

A pictogram is drawing at the edge of language: an image reduced until it reads as a word, instantly, across cultures. Airports run on them. The reduction is the discipline; every added detail moves the sign back toward illustration, which must be looked at rather than read.

Drawing one means finding the silhouette that carries the meaning and refusing everything else. Test it at wayfinding distance and at thumbnail size, in one colour. If it needs a caption, it is not yet a pictogram; if it needs a style, it has stopped being one.