I'm pretty sure that's not hexadecimal, because on the page where you can change your avatar (
http://www.bungie.net/Account/Settings.aspx?page=avatar; you'll have to go to the left using the control above the pictures), the seven groups are each different avatars, and their filenames are 1.jpg through 7.jpg, in the order they appear in the big picture from left to right.
They reminded me of these:
but nothing quite matches up (again), even upside-down. While I was doing that comparison I opened the main picture in MS Paint and it looked kind of odd, not like it looked in Chrome or Paint.net or Windows' preview thing; it looked like this:
I've seen before where PNGs have their transparency turned into something else by programs that can't read them right, but that's generally white or black, sometimes gray; I've never seen something like this before. I played around with the paint bucket tool and how sensitive it is in Paint.net and I was able to also fill in some areas there didn't look were different (they looked transparent) that were the same as what's here, and I opened it in Windows Live Photo Gallery (where it looked like it did in the browser) and saved it as a JPEG and got the same weird result, so I think the areas outside the blocks are done in different colors (well, different shades of gray) but set to have 100% transparency.
As for the composition of the characters I thought about how they could be related
- 1 is a straight line, like the 1 of a lot of cultures
- 2 could be interpreted as twisting the 1, or twisting or wrapping something around it
- 3 has what could be another turn, bringing the separated top back together
- 4 could be tightening up the top and making the bottom more open
- 5 might be adding another twist or another element to the top
- 6 seems like taking the narrowing in the upper part of 5 and moving it higher, leaving a bigger space
- 7 looks like taking the open bottom and joining it back to itself, or adding something
Also with the weird version of the main picture I noticed that
- 1 has no extraneous blocks
- 2 and 7 are opposites
- the background/ancillary stuff on 3 is the opposite of the blocks on 3, and the same goes for 4
- 5 and 6 don't have an opposite in the picture
I think this goes somewhere-- where, I have no idea; what about you guys?