I was looking at Pentagram’s elegant new logo for the One Laptop Per Child program—the non-profit organization has the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations—and I couldn’t help but be reminded of a logo I’d just seen on my trip to Italy, where, in the sleepy Cinqueterre town of Vernazza, my sugar packet from Albergo Gianni had a similar four-part glyph:

It’s as charming and childlike as the Pentagram logo, almost a rebus, and I can’t help but enjoy the fact that the owner probably designed it himself.

All of these sorts of marks and logos remind me in their muti-part pictoriality of Egyptian hieroglyphics, of which this is a fairly typical sample:

One of the cool things about Egyptian hieroglyphics is also visible in the Pentagram logo: it combines a variety of forms of reading. The word “One” is denoted by its stylized Arabic numeral, and Egyptians had a separate set of characters for dealing with numbers as well. The “Laptop” is denoted by an ideogram, or picture of a laptop, and Egyptians commonly used what are called determinative characters (basically ideograms) to make sure that their phonetic clusters were clearly read and understood. The word “Child” is handled the same way. What’s interesting is even the word “Per,” denoted by an arrow moving left-to-right from “Laptop” to “Child,” also has an analogue in the Egyptian hieroglyphics: reading direction was based on the way the ideograms were facing. So, were you to reverse the positions of the “Laptop” and “Child” in this logo, the arrow would reverse direction too, and it would be understood just as well.

This “hieroglyphic” form of logo-making seems like it’s ripe for further exploration. The Pentagram logo and Albergo Gianni logo both seem like they’d be read equally well by children of all cultures, or travellers from all countries. The Egyptians would approve.