Reading: New Hieroglyphs and language of dreams

Reading through each of these short articles it was interesting to me to see the process of how symbols and icons can have. It's very relate-able to what our current process is with our current icon project. In the first part the idea of change was in mind with the woman and man icons. Changing the initial icon from a more updated and readable version was the goal, and the way the company wanted to use each one was interesting. The company thought of using the two icons as a pair when you needed to use them as a pair, but if not being used as a pair the only icon used would be the man icons which would represent a gender-neutral person. In the second article they discussed how the Japanese wanted to use Chinese characters for their alphabet, but tweaking them to be used for the Japanese, which related a lot to this project for me because using something already set in stone and represented and tweaking it to your like is difficult. Things get lost in translation and can be represented differently within content. A good example of this is my poison ivy leaf. My story is about a picnic gone wrong, and people always question what the leaf is. But, I was thinking within content of my picnic being a bad one people would automatically understand that it was a bad plant and they should stay away from it. Obviously due editing my icons to make it more understandable it works better now. All in all, these readings just represent how icons can be changed all the time. And location and content have a lot to due with how they are read.