A Letter From the Publisher

By John A. Meyers

Of all the art forms in TIME, the smallest are the pictorial symbols. Usually less than one inch square, these graphic illustrations appear at the beginning of two or more stories that are related thematically. The elements of last month's cover package on Madonna, for example, were linked by a symbol representing her slinky, peek-a-boo belly button. For this week's cover stories on the Administration's tax program, a hand pouring coins into Uncle Sam's hat is employed. To tie together stories on the cyclone in Bangladesh and the soccer riot in Belgium, an anguished face is used.

Almost 100 such icons have run in TIME since the magazine introduced them more than seven years ago. They have ranged from a jackboot stamping on a Polish flag, representing the crushing of Solidarity in 1981, to a basketball hovering over a hockey puck for a cover story last March on Larry Bird and Wayne Gretzky. Stories about the 1984 presidential campaign had their own symbol, the figure 84 with a donkey in one loop of the 8 and an elephant in the other.

Nearly all these miniatures are the work of Executive Art Director Nigel Holmes, who oversees the creation of TIME's maps, charts and other graphic art. Holmes produced more than 200 illustrations in seven years for Britain's Radio Times, the journal of the BBC, before joining TIME in 1978. He has written a book on the subject, Designing Pictorial Symbols, released last week by Watson-Guptill. (A previous book by Holmes, Designer's Guide to Creating Charts & Diagrams, was published last year.) Holmes' new book contains extensive research into the history of graphic symbols. "It goes back to picture writing, hobo signs, even cave paintings of the Southwest American Indians," he explains. "And, of course, flags, which helped armies recognize their own people in olden times."

To produce an appropriate symbol for a TIME project, Holmes tries to mesh the emblem with the major illustrations of the layout. One of his favorites was a drawing of a finger poised over a red button, which was used in a 1982 cover story about fears of nuclear war. The impact was enhanced by a large facing photograph of a mushroom cloud. "It is often helpful to get a play between two things," says Holmes. "When TIME did a September 1983 cover on the downed Korean airliner, we used the Communist hammer-and-sickle symbol, with the plane as the hammer being cut by the sickle. It was both accusatory and effective.

"This week's symbols are particularly straightforward," says Holmes. "To illustrate complex subjects like these, the most obvious solutions are usually the best ones."