Stop inventing every symbol from scratch

A visual vocabulary is a set of simple symbols you can reuse. The most useful library is not the largest one. It is the one that matches your work.

Letters are shapes too. An uppercase A can become a mountain, S a path, and O a head or magnifying glass. You do not need to choose between writing and drawing.

Hand-drawn example treating letters such as U, M, Z, and O as basic shapes and progressively combining them into a light bulb — Letters into shapes · 01Do not treat a letter only as text. Rotate it, overlap it, or add one line, and it becomes the starting point for a new picture.

Draw a 4 × 4 grid and fill it with the 16 concepts you use most. Each cell gets a word, one minimal symbol, and one alternative.