The Mountain Icon Mystery: How Two Peaks Became the Internet's Universal Missing Image Symbol

This small icon holds so much, and yet it can also mean that there is nothing to see at all.

You've likely experienced it countless times: waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should appear. This is the universal placeholder icon for a "missing image."

Have you ever wondered why this particular scene became universally adopted across digital platforms?

As an environmental humanities scholar, I'm fascinated by how wilderness symbols appear in our everyday digital experiences.

This little mountain icon – sometimes featuring a sun or cloud in the background, other times crossed out or broken – has become the standard symbol across digital platforms to indicate something missing or forthcoming. It appears in numerous contexts, and once you start looking for it, you'll notice it everywhere.

It appears when you click to add a picture in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. You can even purchase ironic posters featuring this icon. Recently, I spotted a version of it in my Subaru's infotainment display as a placeholder for a radio station logo.

But why specifically mountain peaks? And what is the origin of this ubiquitous symbol?

The placeholder icon represents a form of semiotic convergence, where a symbol comes to mean the same thing across various contexts. Similar to how a magnifying glass universally represents "search" or how a leaf symbolizes "eco-friendly."

This phenomenon relates to "convergent design evolution," where organisms or cultures independently arrive at similar solutions or shapes, despite having little or no contact with one another.

In evolutionary biology, bats, birds, and insects all developed wings independently. Stilt houses emerged in diverse cultures worldwide as a practical solution for shoreline dwellings. Similarly, engineers in different regions designed comparable airplane fuselages without collaboration.

For some reason, the little mountain symbol worked effectively across platforms to convey open-ended meanings. Web developers needed a simple shorthand to indicate that something should or could appear in that space.

Depending on context, the mountain icon might invite users to insert an image, indicate loading or uploading in progress, or signify a missing or broken image.

But of all possible symbols, why choose a mountain?

In 1994, visual designer Marsh Chamberlain created a graphic with three colorful shapes as a placeholder for missing images or broken links in Netscape Navigator. These shapes appeared on paper with a torn corner. While the torn paper element sometimes still appears with mountains, it's unclear exactly when the original shapes transformed into mountain peaks.

Developers on Stack Exchange suggest the mountain peak icon might originate from the "landscape mode" icon on Japanese SLR cameras – the setting that maximizes depth of field to keep both foreground and background in focus.

This landscape scene mode, visible on many 1990s digital cameras, was typically represented by two mountain peaks, intuitively suggesting outdoor usage to photographers.

Another interesting connection emerged from Stack Exchange discussions: the icon's resemblance to Microsoft XP's famous "Bliss" wallpaper. If you used a PC after 2001, you likely remember those rolling green hills against a blue sky with wispy clouds.

This stock photo, captured by National Geographic photographer Charles O'Rear, was purchased by Bill Gates' digital licensing company Corbis in 1998. The empty hillside became iconic as Windows XP's default desktop wallpaper.

"Bliss" was widely considered the quintessential generic stock photo, just as the placeholder icon became universally understood to represent a "missing image." It seems significant that both feature mountains or hills against sky.

Mountains and skies inherently evoke mystery and possibility, even while remaining beyond our reach.

Consider Japanese artist Hokusai's "36 Views of Mount Fuji" from the 1830s, most famously "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," which features the iconic mountain in the background. Each painting presents the mountain from different perspectives, filled with intricate details and an atmosphere of mystery.

I suspect the landscape icon on Japanese camera dials might have emerged as a minimalist reference to Mount Fuji, Japan's highest peak. From certain angles, Mount Fuji rises behind a smaller incline. Even Fujifilm borrowed its name from this iconic mountain.

The captivating aesthetics of mountains remind me of environmental writer Gary Snyder's 1965 translation of Han Shan's "Cold Mountain Poems." Han Shan – literally meaning "Cold Mountain" – was an eighth-century Chinese Buddhist poet. "Shan" translates to "mountain" and is represented by the Chinese character 山, which visually resembles a mountain.

Han Shan's poetic riddles celebrate mountains' bewildering aspects:

Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is a blue sky.
The rooms are all vacant and vague.
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.
The mystery is the point

Mountains serve as universal representations of the unseen and longed-for – whether in poetry or on slow-loading websites – because they inspire wonder about what might lie beyond.

The placeholder icon functions like mountains have for millennia, serving as what environmental philosopher Margaret Grebowicz describes as an object of desire. To Grebowicz, mountains exist as places to behold, explore, and sometimes conquer.

The placeholder icon's ambiguity is inherent in its form: mountains are often perceived as distant and foreboding, yet these little peaks appear in everyday computing situations. The icon might even suggest humans' innate tendency to be "nature-positive," even when engaged with technology.

This small icon contains multitudes, while paradoxically indicating there's nothing to see.

Viewed this way, what began as semiotic convergence becomes a tiny allegory for digital life broadly: a wilderness of possibilities, with so much just beyond our reach.

(Author: Christopher Schaberg, Director of Public Scholarship, Washington University in St. Louis)

(This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.)

(Disclosure Statement: Christopher Schaberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.)