Laundry care

The best-designed grammar in this institute that nobody has learned. Five shapes, a handful of modifiers, no words in any language — and a comprehension rate that would fail any test the standards bodies apply to their own safety signs.

Grammar: The base shape assigns the process: a tub for washing, a triangle for bleaching, a square for drying, an iron for ironing, a circle for professional care. Modifiers then assign the degree, and they are consistent across every process — dots for temperature, where more dots mean hotter; bars beneath the symbol for mechanical gentleness, where more bars mean gentler; and a cross through any symbol forbids that process outright. Learn five shapes and three modifiers and the entire label parses, in any language, on any garment. The grammar is complete, orthogonal and genuinely well made, which is what makes the outcome so instructive.
Governance: ISO 3758 internationally; ASTM D5489 in the United States, which adds words; and the Japanese JIS system, revised in 2016 to align with ISO after decades of divergence. A garment sold across three markets can carry three systems on one label, which is a governance failure rather than a design one.
Members: Five base shapes, with dot, bar and cross modifiers.

§Its members

Geometric stand-ins. The ISO 3758 care symbols are not encoded; the shapes above are the plain geometry the standard builds on.

Sources · 3

documented ISO 3758 — textile care labelling using symbols.
documented ASTM D5489 for the US care-labelling system, and the 2016 revision of the Japanese JIS symbols to align with ISO.
traditional The judgement that the system would fail the comprehension threshold of ISO 9186 (→ Visual Grammar, VG·0003). The Institute has not run the test; the inference is its own.