Gye Nyame, "except for God," is the most widely reproduced of all Adinkra symbols and, in W. Bruce Willis's account of the corpus, the one most consistently placed first in any published list, functioning as something close to a summary emblem for the whole system rather than one proverb among sixty. The design reads as two curled, comma-like forms turned away from each other around a small central motif, conventionally glossed as representing the supremacy and boundlessness of God's power, with no beginning and no end a human designer could draw a border around.
The proverb it condenses runs, in full, that nothing is greater than God, so a person need fear nothing else, an assertion of divine supremacy that Willis records as functioning devotionally rather than as a narrow theological claim tied to one denomination, since Gye Nyame circulates across Ghana's Christian, Muslim and indigenous Akan religious communities alike without any one of them treating it as exclusively their own. Willis records that the specific pictorial reading of the central motif, whether it depicts a stylized fern frond, a heart, or an abstract geometric form standing for the divine, is not settled in the sources he surveys, and rather than choose one account as correct he records the range of readings side by side, treating the proverb's meaning as far more securely established than any single account of what the central shape is meant to picture.