Why the placeholder icon is two mountain peaks-and what they might symbolize

"It's happened to you countless times: You're waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. It's the placeholder icon for a "missing image." But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted? As a scholar of environmental humanities, I pay attention to how symbols of wilderness appear in everyday life."

"The little mountain icon-sometimes with a sun or cloud in the background, other times crossed out or broken-has become the standard symbol, across digital platforms, to signal something missing or something to come. It appears in all sorts of contexts, and the more you look for this icon, the more you'll see it. You click on it in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint when you want to add a picture."

"The placeholder icon can be thought of as a form of semiotic convergence, or when a symbol ends up meaning the same thing in a variety of contexts. For example, the magnifying glass is widely understood as "search," while the image of a leaf means "eco-friendly." It's also related to something called " convergent design evolution," or when organisms or cultures-even if they have little or no contact-settle on a similar shape or solution for something."

A small mountain-range graphic serves as the ubiquitous placeholder for missing images across digital platforms. The icon appears in many contexts, including office software image insertion, ironic posters, and vehicle infotainment displays. The recurring use stems from semiotic convergence, whereby a symbol comes to mean the same thing across contexts, and from convergent design evolution, where disparate creators settle on similar solutions. Comparable symbolic convergences include the magnifying glass for search and the leaf for eco-friendly, while convergent evolution examples include wings in bats, birds, and insects and independent stilt-house and airplane fuselage designs. The precise origin of the mountain placeholder remains unclear.

Read at Fast Company