It’s happened to you many times: you’re waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a small mountain range where an image should be. This icon is the placeholder for the “missing image”.
But have you ever wondered why this scene was accepted around the world?
As an environmental humanities researcher, I pay attention to how symbols of the desert appear in everyday life.
The small mountain symbol—sometimes with a sun or cloud in the background, sometimes crossed out or broken—has become a standard symbol across digital platforms to indicate something missing or something to come. It appears in all kinds of contexts, and the more you look for this symbol, the more you’ll see it.
When you want to add a picture, you click on it in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. You can buy an ironic poster of the icon to put on your wall. The other morning, I even noticed a version of it on the Subaru’s infotainment screen as a radio station logo.
So why this particular image of mountain peaks? And where did it come from?
reach the same solution
A placeholder symbol can be thought of as a form of semiotic convergence, or when a symbol ends up with the same meaning in different contexts. For example, a magnifying glass is widely known as “searching”, while an image of a leaf means “eco-friendly”.
It also relates to something called “convergent design evolution,” or when organisms or cultures—even if they have little or no contact—come to a similar shape or solution to something.
In evolutionary biology, you can see the evolution of convergent design in bats, birds, and insects, all of which use wings but have developed them in their own ways. Log houses emerged in various cultures around the world as a way to build durable homes along beaches and riverbanks. Recently, engineers in different parts of the world designed similar aircraft bodies independently of each other.
For whatever reason, Little Mountain just worked across platforms to evoke open meanings: early web developers needed a simple, concise way to indicate that something else should or could exist.
Depending on the context, a small mountain may invite the user to insert the image into a document. It may mean that an image is loading or is being uploaded. Or it could mean that an image is missing or broken.
Down a rabbit hole on a mountain
But out of millions of possibilities, why the mountain?
In 1994, visual designer Marsh Chamberlain created a graphic with three colorful shapes as a missing or broken link image for the Netscape Navigator web browser. The figures appeared on a piece of paper with a torn corner. Although slotted paper sometimes appears with a mountain, it is unclear when the square, circle, and triangle became a mountain.
Users on Stack Exchange, a forum for developers, suggest that the mountain peak icon may be a reference to the “horizontal mode” icon on the dials of Japanese SLR cameras. This feature adjusts the aperture to maximize the depth of field so that both the foreground and background are in focus.
Horizontal scene mode – visible on many digital cameras in the 1990s – was generally represented by two mountain peaks, with the idea that the camera user would directly know to use this setting outdoors.
Another insight emerged from the Stack Exchange discussion: the icon bears a resemblance to the Microsoft XP wallpaper called “Bliss”. If you owned a PC in the years after 2001, you probably remember colorful green hills with blue skies and wispy clouds.
The stock photo was taken by National Geographic photographer Charles O’Rear. It was then acquired by Bill Gates’ digital licensing company Corbis in 1998. The blank domain in this image was converted to an icon using Windows XP as the default desktop wallpaper.
Mountain riddles
“Bliss” became widely recognized as the most generic of public stock photos, in the same way that the placeholder symbol for “missing image” became universally recognized. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they both show mountains or hills and the sky.
Mountains and skies are mysterious and full of possibility, even if they remain beyond comprehension.
Consider Japanese artist Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mount Fuji,” a collection of his paintings from the 1830s—the most famous of which is probably “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” with a small Mount Fuji in the background. Each painting shows the iconic mountain from different perspectives and is full of small details. All have an air of mystery.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the landscape icon appeared on Japanese camera screens as a minimalist nod to Mount Fuji, Japan’s tallest mountain. From some viewpoints, Mt.Fuji is behind a smaller slope. And the Japanese photography company Fujifilm even borrowed the name of that mountain for its brand.
The beguiling aesthetics of the mountains also reminded me of environmentalist Gary Snyder’s 1965 translation of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain Poems. Han Shan – his name literally means “cold mountain” – was a Chinese Buddhist poet who lived in the late 8th century. “Shan” translates as “mountain” and is represented by the Chinese character 山, which also resembles a mountain.
Han Shan’s poems, themselves little riddles, revel in the puzzling aspects of the mountains:
Cold mountain is a house
Without beams and walls.
Six doors left and right are open
The hall is a blue sky.
The rooms are all empty and dim.
The east wall hits the west wall
In the center of nothing
The mystery is the point
I think mountains serve as a universal representation of the unseen and desired—whether in a poem or a poor web browser—because people can look at a mountain and wonder what might be up there.
The placeholder symbol does what mountains have done for thousands of years, as what the environmental philosopher Margaret Grbovich describes as an object of desire. For Grebowicz, mountains exist as places to see, explore, and sometimes conquer.
About the author
Christopher Schaberg is director of public scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis. This article from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The inherent ambiguity of the cursor symbol is reflected in its shape: mountains are often seen as distant and foreboding places. At the same time, small peaks appear in a variety of mundane computing conditions. This symbol could even be a curious indication of how humans can’t be “nature positive”, even when they’re on a computer or phone.
This little icon holds a lot, and at the same time it can paradoxically mean that there is nothing to see at all.
Looking at it, an example of semiotic convergence becomes a small allegory for digital life: a desert of possibilities, with things far beyond reach.
