Play, pause, rewind – where do these universal media symbols come from?

By Jason Kennedy, Senior Lecturer Above the Bar of Animated Performance, Auckland University of Technology

The play symbol is one of the world’s most recognisable icons. Across languages, writing systems, and cultures, a single right-pointing triangle is widely understood as “start”.

Yet there’s nothing about this simple geometric icon that inherently suggests the start of something. So why does it carry this meaning?

The emergence of such universal media symbols is relatively recent in design history.

An early case study

From the 1960s, consumer audio and video technologies became internationally widespread. In 1963, the Philips…

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