Archive for February, 2007

"No!" says the signified

Monday, February 19th, 2007

How frustrating. Like many people (namely readers of Boing Boing) I saw the new radiation symbol released this morning by the IAEA. Like many people, I thought it was terrible. I drafted a few thoughts to blog this evening.

And then along came Andrew Crow from good old Adaptive Path, to pre-empt everything I was about to say, only with considerably more clarity and analytical thought. My underused graphic design muscles remain unflexed. Seriously though, how on earth did this get released? It’s just awful. Design by committee at its most passive and clumsy.

That said, even our trusty old UK roadsigns get it wrong sometimes. The example below is no vehicles carrying explosives, apparently. Quite why this merited a graphical depiction, I don’t know.

“Apollonia! No!”

Compare that with my favourite sign of all time. Clear, unambiguous, and actually quite funny.

“Shhiiii—-”

Categories: signs, atomic, radiation, semiotics, graphicdesign

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Delettering public space

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

Europeans really know how to execute large-scale public art:

The installation “Delete! Delettering public space” saw all non-essential signage in a Vienna district covered for a fortnight. It would have been fascinating to see how people navigated the streets without their usual visual prompts. Not particularly well, I’d wager.

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Installation consternation

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Here’s one for This Is Broken: installing the trial version of Axure, only to be warned that I should close it before I install it.

Very busy. Working on a few quite big things, one of which is to read Don Quixote. When the pace slows down perhaps I’ll share my plans.

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WordCount

Monday, February 5th, 2007

I rediscovered an old site I’d meant to post about long ago: WordCount. It’s another of those interesting visualisation tools, this time showing the commonality of English words. Derived from Oxford University’s British National Corpus of 100 million words, it’s an obvious practical example of the long tail. Since we get by on an estimated average vocabulary of 21,000 words* (compared to the 86,800 in Wordcount), there’s plenty of undiscovered material to play with.

Aside from the interest derived from simply playing with it and learning more about our language, some wags have created games from forming sentences from words appearing consecutively in the list:

• “Despotism clinching internet” (seems somewhat prescient of the net neutrality debate)
• “America ensure oil opportunity”
• “Apple formula: imagination”

Or, of course, you can play the slightly smug vocabulary-testing game, by testing your favourite obscure word and keeping score. Me? I started with a mediocre ‘abstemious’ (61282nd) but quickly followed it up with an impressive ‘ziggurat’ (83305th). No triple-word score sadly. There’s also QueryCount, which is an exploration of the most frequently sought-out terms, and is of course considerably more profane.

Of course, sites like this don’t really have a purpose per se, of course, other than exploration. But isn’t it nice sometimes to release ourselves from the current task-based focus of the web, and get back to good old-fashioned surfing?

* For an alarmist aside, read Are iPods shrinking the British vocabulary?.

Categories: language, vocabulary, wordcount, english

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