3 minute read
FROM GONE TO GROWTH
from The Bleed, Vol. 13
by bleedmag
JOSHUA RODRIGUEZ
In the fall of 2020, there was a fire known as the Holiday Farm Fire that burned 173,393 acres of the Willamette National Forest, and in result, the destruction of over 768 homes.These photos were taken off of the McKenzie highway on April 24th, 2022. It is there we found the emergence of new plant life intertwined with the charred trees, animals returned to forage and seek new dwellings, and people rebuilding their livelihoods. Despite all that was lost, the plants, animals, and people are resilient and filled with hope.
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Symbols and icons have become ubiquitous in our modern society. While their humble beginnings are no longer in the forefront of how we look at them, we can decipher the meanings almost instantly. Symbols are small graphics who’s meaning must be learned, images which have become transcendent forms, woven into every facet of how we live. From wayfinding to poisonous precautions, icons’ clear representational nature tells us everything we need to know in one mark. Both icons and symbols serve many purposes, but they can primarily be distilled into three categories — to create value, to describe, or to identify.
While most of us associate symbols with email addresses, trademarks, or registration marks, earlier symbols served a very different, but equally important function — record keeping and organization. The history and evolution of art and design as separate disciplines has its roots in the same ancient practices from which iconography grew. Art tends to be a visual expression of the artists’ thoughts and emotions where design is about visual communication. In graphic design we are taught that when we design a mark, it is a mark made with purpose and goes beyond the aesthetics or beauty of it. The term “graphic deszign” didn’t come around until the 1920’s, but the practice of marks made with utilitarian and communicative purpose, and thus the study of graphic design history, begins in ancient times.
The non-verbal spread of information dates back to 20,000 B.C, when cave paintings communicated how to stay safe or where to seek prey. The evolution of symbols progressed through reduction. The strongest symbols omit the non-essential elements. Prehistoric symbols acted as not just a way to communicate, but to also make sense of the world in general. We see symbols from the Cro-Magnon people of Europe to the Ancient Sumarians of Mesopotamia that act as both means of communication, and record-keeping.
Over the next 17,000 years, these pictographic forms of communication de- veloped into the more advanced system now known as Egyptian Hieroglyphics, distinguished primarily in that the symbols in them began to carry abstract meanings unto themselves, separate from the visual image upon which the symbol was initially based.
As society evolved, so did the need for better systems of communication. Sumarians discovered a technique called cuneiform which consists of a more abstract, yet much faster way of documenting their surroundings. Cuneiform, which means “Wedge-shaped” is essentially a pictographic form of writing. There were, however, components in just a written language and more into a functioning image. both Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphic graphical systems that symbolically depicted an audible utterance, marking the beginning of a journey towards a written language.
From the heraldry of Medieval Europe to mon from Japan, symbols and icons were used extensively in the middle ages. These examples of visual identity and communication bring us closer to the modern concept of graphic design. While these “emblems” served as identification or lineage, and the representational sensibilities in them translate to our modern understanding of mark making, the concept of a visual identity system, or universally recognizable “mark” for a corporate entity didn’t truly mature until the mid 20th century.
In the 1950s through the late 20th century, graphic designers in the United States, such as Paul Rand & Lester Beal, took the concept of a corporate brand to the next level. They created appropriately-dubbed “iconic” identities for companies such as IBM, ABC, and the International Paper Company, that became not only signatures of companies, but parts of the cultural ethos of the entire society.
Drawing on both of these two systems–though it is thought primarily on Hiergogpyhs–the Phoenicians of the Mediterranean are credited with the development of what we know today as the alphabet. Unlike previous forms of graphic communication, an alphabet is composed of unique symbols representative not of a particular object, action, or story, but of basic sounds, which could be strung together into a written representation of spoken language. While early writing is thus a collection of symbols, the term symbol categorizes itself forward by extending beyond
When computers brought about ubiquitous informal communication in type, we began to use established typographic elements to build pictographs, in the form of emoticons. Computer Science professor Scott Fahlman, of Carnegie Mellon University proposed and used the first digital emoticon on the morning of September 19th, 1982. Dr Fahlman’s creative use of typography to indicate humor eventually evolved into the international system now known as emoji, the marks within which are still constantly evolving in their culturally affected meanings, just as Egyptian hieroglyphs morphed from pictographs to abstract representations.
While we have evolved tremendously over the course of human history, we still are creating and simplifying marks all these years later. Developing icons and symbols that elicit the widest understanding with the most basic graphic is the highest aspiration of many designers, and the way in which this process involves a constant dialogue with cultural evolution means, for better and for worse, this work will never be complete.