Alien glyphs
Is this an alien alphabet, and is there a secret decoder ring for it? Maybe it’s a syllabary, like Katakana. Maybe it’s a series of ideograms, like Chinese characters. How could we tell which? Or, just possibly, it’s something so alien that we don’t even have a category for it.
We are literate, so we are predisposed to believe that anything with this combination of regularity and disorder has to mean something. My fingers want to type “symbol”, but to call something a symbol is to assume that it has a particular kind of meaning. Maybe the glyphs are asemic writing, decorative but meaningless. How could we tell?
The glyphs were inspired by my non-periodic graph paper. I was designing a favicon, and with the limitation of 16 by 16 pixels, I wasn’t able to express the idea of a sudoku, so I went with Plan B.
I realized that my favicon was one of a number of variations. Well, of course, let’s generate them all and see what they look like. Let’s put them next to each other in different combinations and see what happens.