The power symbol

Design, it's all around us. Have you ever stopped to think about why your toothbrush neck is the way it is? That little bend near the top allows you to get the back of your teeth. What about your mug? The handle is just far enough away so you knuckles aren't pressed up against the hot ceramic but close enough that it isn't taking up too much space in your cupboard.

But onto today's topic, the power symbol. Like your toothbrush and mug, you likely haven't given it much thought, it's just that thing that's been around forever that you've taken for granted. But someone had to come up with it at some point, so why did they make it look the way it is?

In the past, electronic devices had switches or levers with an on and off state, usually with some text accompanying it to label the directions for the switches. There were also two state buttons that could be pressed once to depress it and once again to pop it back out. These systems were great and all, but electronics started going everywhere, to say the least. Mongolian's were getting electronics, China, Israel etc... Problem was that these aren't English speaking countries.

Hieroglyphics lasted a long time. Why? Because the human brain works visually and pictures and symbols can portray more meaning than words can. With this in mind, an international standard was created for universal symbols to be used on electronic devices. It's called ISO 7000 or IEC 60417. The power symbol was added in 1973.

You're reading this on an electronic device, which, at a basic level is just 0's and 1's pushed in certain orders to achieve different things. Binary plays a role in the power symbol, well, it's basically the whole role. You can see the big 0 that is cut off by the 1, implying the meaning of on and off. Pretty simple now that you understand right? You should be able to guess what this means too:

But there's another power symbol, it looks the same except the 1 is fully encapsulated. This is supposed to be used when a device goes from full power off to full power on at the power supply where as the other one is made for deep sleeping. The usage of each has been inconsistent through the years, so have a look, see which devices you own are using the correct symbols.

There are thousands of other symbols in IEC 60417 you might have seen. Here are a couple, guess what they mean and where you could probably find them.

So there you go. I find it interesting that there is so much behind so little.

Keep your eyes open, watch where you're walking and I'll see you back here in a little while for another post!