Black and white and read all over

I ♥ pictograms!

I’m fascinated and impressed by the way a three dimensional object or a piece of information can be reduced down to a simple, flat, monochrome graphic and yet can still be universally understood.   It must take a special kind of skill to design one effectively, but presumably the creators go through life without ever receiving any credit.

There’s no room for fuss or detail; it’s art at its most basic, no-nonsense level.  I love the use of blocks and shapes, symmetry and white space.  It's not a way of drawing I'd find easy, with rarely any outlines and no opportunity for subtle shading. 

Some pictograms are just perfect in their simplicity, although I struggled with a few on this leaflet I picked up the other day.

Among my favourites for being aesthetically pleasing as well as symbolic are the brush (for 'solvent-based paints, wood varnishes and enamels') and the bin (for ‘waste, dirt, filth or refuse’).  That rat is pretty cool too.  You'll be pleased to know I had no intention of sending one through the international mail anyway.

I remember a homework project from my Geography class when I was eleven.  It wasn’t quite the same as coming up with a pictogram but the principle was similar - we had to make simple diagrams to represent objects from an aerial perspective.  I didn’t realise how very unoriginal I was being at the time but, yes, I drew this

Miss T didn’t like it and said she had no idea what it was.  She was a harsh teacher in that first year and we were all rather scared of her.  Mind you, when she came back in the second year as Mrs A she had changed completely and was nice as pie…

I’ll be forever grateful to the mysterious Mr A for making her a happy woman and for inadvertently making my Geography lessons a lot more enjoyable.  I hope he enlightened her to a whole series of visual jokes about sombreros.

There can be no doubt that this is a Mexican frying an egg

But maybe the best ever use of a completely stripped down, perfect, graphic pictogram is this Frank Zappa album cover.  Pure brilliance.

For more musical pictogram ideas how about these: 

Rock’n’roll goes hieroglyphical


NB This post was partly inspired by this (Thank you Dr MVM)

'Just what I always wanted' / 'Now those days are gone'

The rather incongruous mention of Bucks Fizz of all people in my recent post reminded me of another old picture from around 1982 so I pulled it out from its mouldy plastic sleeve in the portfolio behind the sofa…

 

Please, please make allowances for me being still in my teens at the time I drew this…and don't look too closely at the hands and feet (of course, now you've read that, you probably will...)

I think I was inspired by the Top Of The Pops video for the Land Of Make Believe single where they get to dress up in several different outfits, some of which were just ridiculously inappropriate, so I was being tongue-in-cheek here by including the very clichéd-looking punk Destroy t-shirt - although I could be wrong, but I’m not resilient enough to sit through the whole video to check if Bobby ever did don such a garment parody-style.  (Just for people who don't know me personally, or on whom any irony may be lost, I was NOT a fan!)

I got really into depicting pop people of the time in rather bizarre ways which may explain this

Whether you were to threaten me with lead piping in the library or not, I just don’t have a clue now why I’ve shown Mari Wilson as a Cluedo character (maybe because she didn't need hands or feet...?), though I think I probably had the intention of creating a whole set of music-related cards for the game one day. And now I think about it, it could include, oh….Dr John, Colonel Abrahams, Professor Green (Yes! That works on two levels!), hmmm…Missy Elliot…?  Mr Mister…?  Then again, perhaps not…

Both Bucks Fizz and Mari Wilson were doing well in the music charts then and somehow these illustrations, amongst others, got me to this stage the following year...

...which was very exciting and I did go down to their Carnaby Street office and met the very nice Art Director who wrote the letter.  I think I got a free cuppa out of it and the thrill of knowing I’d sat on the same loo seat as Siouxsie might once have done -  but nothing else.  The pictures were returned to their plastic sleeves in the portfolio, which has now lived behind several sofas over 27 years, and unsurprisingly never saw the light of day until here, which may explain the mould.