Some better proaches have been used with practical applications, on TRUE languages supported by ACTIVE communities : it is sign-writing which represent sign languages which are FAR richer than what is proposed. They have a true grammar, a true syntax, they are versatile, with good links to other oral languages. And they solve practical problems.
Other approches includes the proliferation of *conventional* pictograms to represent only basic meanings. But what ius important is that they are used under a convention that is widely recognized, and supported by active standards. This includes trafic signs on roads, rivers, railways, or pictograms frequently seen on maps or on directing banners in closed spaces (e.g. toilets, phone, stairs...). This uncludes also conventonal pictograms for representing a set of dangers or health safety, or environmental issues (recycling...). Or those used in meteoroly. Or the set of logos (logograms) used by organizations as trademarks. But they do not encode sentences, but essential items in their own specific domain of application ; they are essentially static in nature, not dynamic like actual humane languages and cannot be used to define other concepts than what they represent isolately. You can't really "speak" with pictograms and logograms. But to develop it to represent true languages, you'll need centuries if not milleniums to represent concepts and articulate them, and to include also some honograms. This results in ideograms, and notably the very rich (and still uncounted) set of sinograms used to write Chinese and partly Japanese and Korean. But in fact this system becomes so complex that it naturelly evolved to keep only the phonograms and you get the various alphabets of the world. The development of orthography comes later, when this written form of the language wants to "normalize" exchanges in a population using various spoken dialects, and when phonograms alone become ambiguous. For Chinese the system has evolved by compbining ideograms and phonograms to solve the ambiguities that phonograms alone can't solve without an orthography, and that ideograms alone can't solve with a rich enough set of ideograms only. Sign writing belongs to the categoty of alphabets. Its "phonograms" represent gestures, and they are combined to create semantics according to the orthgraphy and syntax of the sign languages they are used for. Even if some gestures used in sign languages may be perceived as ideograms, their use is in fact not significant alone outside of the grammatical context where these signs are used.