First post brought to you by Twitter and the Standby Symbol

I owe the fact that I have a blog now to Twitter. If I hadn’t joined twitter and started following interesting people, I would not have been inspired to create a forum for my own thoughts. It’s fun to be able to share ideas and links through Twitter, but it’s impossible to develop thoughts through that medium. I could post links to other people’s sites and comment on other people’s sites, but this felt a bit hollow. Wouldn’t it be better to put my thoughts on my site rather than other people’s sites, where I have no cohesive presence?

And one of the first issues that I felt the need to blog about was a design concern. (Thank you to Graphic Identity for posting this on Twitter.) Logos that use the standby symbol. The point was, if you believe it’s original to use the standby symbol in a logo, think again. But my thoughts went down a different path. I clicked through and found that the symbol that everyone uses with power switches is actually not a power symbol, but a standby symbol:

The power symbol is similar, but not nearly as common:

As a designer, I would say that the proper thing to do would be to use the power symbol if you are trying to communicate the power on/off qualities of a power button. But as a philosopher I would say that the standby symbol has lost its meaning: it no longer refers to standby state. It refers to power state. When the meaning of words change, often through widespread misuse, dictionaries eventually catch up and change their definitions. (Example infer/imply have been confused so much that most dictionaries include imply in the definition of infer.) So we need a new symbol for standby.

The first thing that came to mind for me was the fermata. A fermata is used in musical notation to mean a pause of indefinite length. What better way to describe a standby state? If we put it inside a circle, it takes on some of the button-like qualities of other symbols in the power family.

A pause symbol could also be used, but this visual is so ubiquitous in music and video players, it carries too much meaning from those specific contexts to be used as a standby symbol.

Anyone else have any thoughts on what could be used as the new standby symbol?

For the record, I realize that this discussion is somewhat fanciful. I’m not a member of The International Electrotechnical Commission or anything. But as a designer, I can make choices that can potentially influence the way that symbols are perceived and used in the future.