Stick figure

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Stick figures are simple drawings of people or animals made with straight lines for the arms, legs, and body. The head is usually a circle, filled or not. Hands, feet, and a neck may be drawn or left out, and facial features or hair can be added or omitted. They are easy to read and understood almost everywhere.

People have drawn stick figures for thousands of years, from prehistoric cave art to petroglyphs. Because they are so simple, they’re used in many ways: signs, infographics, animations, and storyboards.

In the 20th century, designers adopted stick figures to create clear pictograms. Otto Neurath helped start ISOTYPE, a system that uses pictures to convey information. The 1972 Munich Olympics and later U.S. Department of Transportation pictograms made these designs familiar around the world.

With the rise of the internet, stick figures became popular in online animation. Tom Fulp began making 2D stick-figure animations on Newgrounds in the early 1990s. In 2001, Zhu Zhiqiang uploaded Xiao Xiao, a short series featuring stick-figure fighting. The webcomic xkcd, which started in 2005, often uses stick figures to explain science and technology. Alan Becker’s Animator vs. Animation (2006) brought stick-figure battles to video.

Pivot Animator, released in 2005 by Peter Bone, made it easy for anyone to create stick-figure animations. Later, Unicode and emoji sets added stick-figure symbols for keyboards.

Today, stick figures appear in signs, education, comics, games, and many online videos. They remain a simple, universal way to show people and actions.