☮ / Peace Sign Unicode / U+262E 

This is the Peace Sign unicode, the precursor to our contemporary Peace Sign emoji. Unicode was created to create a standardized, universal text encoding that displayed consistently across screens. Emojis like the peace symbol were used as early visual expressions, like modern day hieroglyphics.

The image is of a peace sign. The original peace sign symbol is credited to Gerald Holtom who invented it in 1958 as a symbol for Britain’s campaign for nuclear disarmament, however, we’re not talking about the actual symbol here but rather its unicode representation.

Unicode is The Unicode Standard and it’s a text encoding maintained by the Unicode Consortium which is in Mountain View, California. They were largely responsible for bringing in Japanese emojis outside of Japan. Shigetaka Kurita is the designer of the original emojis.

I believe it adds to graphic design history because it shows an early style of expressive language within text. Unicode also highlights the technological desire and necessity for creating a universal encodement that could work across machines and borders. Today, the icons have been replaced to be colorful, these earlier iterations highlight the limitations of the tools at the time, as well as the opportunities when working within restrictions.