Yukio Ota designed the “Running Man” exit sign, which competes globally with the American red “EXIT” sign. The running man is thus the child of both rigorous science and starry-eyed utopianism, and it’s now in use all over the globe.

This is part five of a pretty great series from Slate about the language of signs.

Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe’s increasingly industrial economy. […] Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. […]