The following article will attempt to serve as a primer to a project I’m starting, that attempts to solve design problems, albeit communicated mostly through convoluted art-speak.
I have been thinking a lot about symbols lately.
Symbols are how the human animal learned to make abstract concepts into physical representations, it is how we can talk about and understand more than what we can see right in front of us, both literally and metaphorically.
Why do you love the music you do? How do you understand one user interface better than another? Where does the road you cannot see lead? Of course we rarely, if ever, think about this, but however broadly, symbols are the answer to all these questions.
I read a lot of books where the action takes place in a world other than our own, and I’ve noticed that I very often get caught up in the world-building, the cultural signifiers and the maps more than anything else, even the plot.
So I’ve been sketching a lot on different mental models for symbol creation, and tried to create some kind of map for how we create and disseminate them.
But whenever I try to explain what I’m working on to other people, I somehow get stuck in half-sentences and generally seem quite unable to communicate a single bit of it clearly. So evidently, this is going to need a lot of mind work before it can in the end, hopefully by made somewhat tangible to people outside my head. Which is what symbols do, you know.
This will be an exercise in developing the design language, an attempt at becoming better in my craft. These far-out concepts and crazy tangents will enable me to make smarter logos, create more relevant concepts ideas, and be a better designer in the end.
I’m giving the project a name, or a symbol if you will. This creates a finite space for it to live within, and makes it easier to put a fence around. The name is “Legend”, because 1) it refers to the explanation of the symbols you would find on a map, which is figuratively what I’m trying to do here and 2) it references the history and lore of the subject. The way I’m approaching it, the fourth dimension (being time) is the most interesting parameter to see how symbols change both in meaning and in presentation/expression when interpreted through an unordered series of cultures, often in parallell. We’ll get into that in due time.
I’ve also started building a wiki on the subject, to catalogue and organise all this. But more on that later.
Stay tuned.
