Play, pause, rewind – where do these universal media symbols come from?

Getty Images The play symbol is one of the world’s most recognisable icons. Across languages, writing systems, and cultures, a single right-pointing triangle is widely understood as “start”. Yet there’s nothing about this simple geometric icon that inherently suggests the start of something. So why does it carry this meaning? The emergence of such universal media symbols is relatively recent in design history. An early case study From the 1960s, consumer audio and video technologies became…