Visual Literacy and the Time-Varying Icon

The decreasing cost and increasing capability of computer graphics offers the opportunity to consider a new dynamic, or time-varying, iconic form of written language. Conventional ideographic writing forms, being static, require a very large number of symbols and are hard to learn. The new technology addresses both of these problem areas. Western culture Oriented iconic writing languages already exist, and one, based on American Signing, would really shine if adapted to a dynamic or time-varying presentation form using computer graphics. Some exciting, important, but distant benefits could result from the adoption of such a language form.