What does the question mark mean on the head?

Answer 1

Symbols develop as a visual shorthand language. Even as far back as cave men, humans "communicated" simple messages with pictures.

In real life, we recognize various symbols quickly, such as:

• a circle with a diagonal line as being "Do not enter".
• a symbol of a female in a skirt and posted on a bathroom door means "a female or woman's restroom" but the symbol on the other door is shown in slacks to depict males/men.
• a continuous circle with an arrow on one end means "continuous" or "continue onward"

There are numerous other examples, from road signs, to door signs, to images on packaged products.

Users and designers of the internet have also developed symbols to communicate with a simple picture a specific message. For example, many webpages use an arrow (or opposing arrows) at the bottom of a page to indicate "forward (next)" or "backward (previous)", while other webpages just use the words.

A picture of a "head" typically means "the brain", unless the focus is on the facial expression. For example, "smiley faces" originated from a simple concept of a round ball with dots for eyes and nose and a big curved line for a smile. In the 1970s, this symbol was always on a bright yellow background, to indicate "happiness", "being pleased" with something.

A symbol that uses a head with the person's eyes looking upward means "thinking".

A head-image that has a secondary image placed over it in a central location is communicating, indirectly through 2 images, just one meaning. A head with an exclamation point like this ! would indicate "Surprise!" or "Excitement!" A head with a question mark over its face or partly over the face means "Question". On a website, the question-mark-head symbol typically means, "If you have a question, you can click on this symbol to go to a webpage that was designed to answer frequently asked questions."

The reasons that images work so well to communicate a simple message is that:

• the main image is highly recognizable (example: a head)
• the main image would only have one or two well known meanings (example: a head indicates brain, intelligence, or thought; a face indicates an expression, like a smile)
• the main image, combined with a secondary image that is also well known and easily recognizable, creates a new simple message
• Whatever image or combination of images become so well known and associated with the specific message, that the images themselves communicate to a wide range of people in many different circumstances. For example, if all bathrooms use a similar image on the doors, people from many cultures and countries can understand; this is not equally true if words were used instead, especially with language differences. Images and symbols break language barriers.