A pleasant little romp through iconography and culture from Sophia Lucero. The “hamburger” menu icon we’re familiar with now is really a sign from Taoist cosmology.
Besides ☰, which represents heaven 天, we have ☱ for lake/marsh 澤, ☲ for fire 火, ☳ for thunder 雷, ☴ for wind 風, ☵ for water 水, ☶ for mountain 山, and ☷ for ground 地.
We shouldn’t be using it for a menu icon, but it makes me wonder if we ought to get a semantically and accessibly appropriate Unicode character for a menu. I know there is a whole fancy process for emoji.