Next, "The Calligraphy of Aoyama San'u, " which begins with his early cursive script and ends with the more intuitive and pictographic calligraphy of his later years.

WSJ: The Vision and Calligraphy of Aoyama San'u | Tokyo National Museum | Transformational Characters | By Michael Judge

When asked to choose Chinese words to best describe the outgoing year, participants in a recent online poll indicated their dark mood by listing these Chinese pictographic characters: yuan (resentment), hui (gray), chai (demolish) and si (death).

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Most notably, the entire desktop interface is entirely pictographic, with no title bar menus and very little in the way of pull down commands, which probably makes it easier to teach kids who may still be learning how to read.

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He argued that film editing was a kind of pictographic syntax, that in acting physiognomy was more important than psychology, and that the sound and colour design in a film should be treated as fully expressive elements in their own right.

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