Archive for the ‘signs’ Category
the words don’t fit or the medium is the message
April 16, 2014emergency compliment
April 15, 2014A steady supply of emergency compliments to be used at times of great insecurity. They may come in handy sometimes. This one is for me. I always trip in front of everyone. 
keep calm
April 12, 2014I made these cards based on the now famous British World War poster “Keep Calm and Carry On”, which is in the public domain. You can read about the history here. Rip-offs have become something of a meme. Mail artist and brilliant typographer Keith Bates created the font, based on the original poster series.
keep calm and mail art
love respect and mail art
please do not ever feed trolls
The last one ‘please do not ever feed trolls’ may come in handy, when confronted with internet trolls appearing in internet forums. You are free to use it, whenever you feel the need.
rubber stamps and fonts by Keith Bates
April 11, 2014 
Keith Bates – Rubber Stamp Mail Art. Keith Bates is a personal hero of mine. Not only is he a mail artist, but he makes beautiful fonts, including free ones, which I have been using. Check out the amazing type shop: http://www.k-type.com/
mark making
April 6, 2014
Very nice video on the fascination of mark making – what applies to children may also apply to adults and even the elderly. (I fixed the broken link.)
the forest of signs
April 1, 2014
oh yeah!
August 25, 2012
icon poet
August 11, 2012
Icon Poet – Alle Geschichten dieser Welt | Slanted – Typo Weblog und Magazin.
36 cubes to use for storytelling or as creative writing prompt. Unfortunately they are not cheap. There are similar smaller sets available from Amazon, such as three different sets of Rory’s Story Cubes with nine cubes each.
isotype & literacy learning box
August 10, 2012
Sometimes I create teaching materials for primary school children. Usually they are in German, so not very interesting for this blog here. But this picture domino can be understood and used by all people who know the story of Little Red Riding Hood. The domino follows the events in the fairy tale, based on the Grimm version. The idea is, that every child has to narrate the next bit of the story, before they put the next domino piece down. Sometimes essential details have to be filled in such as the wolf devouring grandma and the little girl, but these story elements will rarely be left out anyway. So it is an exercise in sequencing and story telling. But I think it could be fun for grown ups too.
The graphics used are mostly from http://www.thenounproject.com or in the public domain. These images have been designed in the tradition of ISOTYPE and other signs, which are forming an international visual language in their own right. (Think of the signage on airports or the Olympics.) The image of Red Riding Hood is by Emma Pelling and can be found among many other educational resources at http://www.earlylearninghq.org.uk.
I am very much interested in developing Isotype-like icons for children, to be used in the context of literacy, or rather for developing multimodal literacy. I believe that abstracted and well crafted icons can be a stepping stone to alphabetic reading, as the reader has to make inferences. They also could help to communicate very efficiently to children of all languages, for example, in games or websites or other places. Of course this is happening already to some extent – children learn to read emoticons, icons and symbols in contextual menus of games. But I am sure there is more to be achieved.
The pdf is in German. The last page is meant to be a cover for a DVD storage box. I have been thinking a long time about the most practical and efficient way to store and organize learning games in the classroom. I have come to the conclusion that empty DVD covers without the DVD tray are the most simple and elegant solution. They can be stored on a bookshelf, next to books or with other DVDs, so they can be associated with both books and games. This way they can be easily retrieved and put back to where they belong. They are cheap. The boxes shut tightly, so hopefully cards and small game tokens will not be lost too quickly. The instructions can be written on the back cover and as they are protected, they will not be lost or torn. Where appropriate, a booklet or a game plan can be included (often DVD covers have little clips to hold the booklet down). For example, the story of Red Riding Hood could be provided with this game.
I am happy to borrow, steal and promote good teaching ideas and ideas for classroom organization from wherever they come from. However, I claim to be the first to use DVD covers for literacy learning boxes! Here is the printable pdf. You are free to use it. CC: BY-NC-SA
bild!
February 8, 2011
As other people have said, the iPhone is actually not such a great phone, but I love the fact that I have a reasonably decent camera in my back pocket. This picture I took a while ago . It says what it is: BILD = image.
give real love
June 4, 2010
battles
May 28, 2010
I have subscribed to the Guardian’s art and culture section, and I find many of the things I read there interesting and educational, in a very good sense. What I mean, is that it makes me come across stuff, I would not know about otherwise, stuff which takes my imagination and thinking in new directions. Well, I guess that is one of the things art is supposed to do. But that is rarely what newspapers do.
As an example, here is Jonathan Jones musing about Why Albrecht Altdorfer’s masterpiece gives him nightmares and the reader responses.
guydenning comments: I think, with the inscription floating around in finest script at the top, it almost predates modern TV (or early 20th century cinema) news reporting of war. Turning the terrible into a visual entertainment under the allegedly laudable excuse of education.
And somebody with the nick damienhurst writes: well, I certainly adore the craft involved in this painting but it really keeps amazing me how people can’t really understand that such paintings are basically equivalent to today’s commercials. this one even has a “brand logo” there on top.
That is certainly food for thought about the relationship between art and war, the human, terror and the sublime and, of course, the relationship (or battles?) between word and image, and their producers and audiences.
The picture can be dowloaded from wikimedia
if I made art
May 2, 2010
spot the difference
April 9, 2010
Diptych Riddle by Matthias Hammer and the quote “I find the romanticism of the tasteless delightful” (Max Brod, 1913) from here:
the letter O in film poster design
April 9, 2010
I enjoyed reading the “The letter O in film poster design” and flipping through this collection of film posters. And here is a blog post about the use of guns as letterform.
I could have sworn I had seen another interesting take on a letter on a movie poster by a film of Shyamalan, but could not remember the title. A quick search revealed – it was the movie poster for “Signs” which I had remembered. So much for my memory – I could not remember the word, but remembered the play with typography.
neon boneyard
April 9, 2010
type nesting
January 10, 2010Dubi Kaufmann created a webiste on typenesting.tumblr.com showing images of birds nesting in letters. How sweet is that!
reading traces
November 25, 2009“Writing, like human language, is engendered not only within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more than human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend from our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than one million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces – a bit of scat here, broken twig there – of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.”
This is a quote from David Abram (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous. New York, Random House. To him the alphabet “is a strange and potent technology”.
superman’s secret
November 9, 2009
from Fighting Crime one Post at a Time
I love this image with the WordPress Logo on Superman’s chest. And here is a hello to Richard and Sheela (approaching 70!) who have recently bought a computer and logged on to the net for the first time. Welcome to the wonderful world wide web!
cryptic messages
October 17, 2009
On Transcrypt.de by Frank Baranowski you can find a description for exercises in designing mysterious fonts, derived from known latin scripts, which do not mean anything, see Kryptic 1 and Kryptic2.
Meanwhile I read on Popular Mechanics that the poster for Lost’s final season contains hieroglyphics. Dr. James Allen, Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Chair of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University analyzed the symbols and had this answer: “The hieroglyphs spell out two Egyptian words, meaning ‘Who is the guide?’ or ‘Who is the leader?”
via educating alice
metaphors
September 22, 2009
by Christoph Nieman on christophniemann.com
word and image 
