Symbol Signs: Helvetica Man and Beyond

A man and a woman walk into a sign, or what Helvetica has to do with slipping on ice.

In 1974, the U.S. Department of Transportation commissioned AIGA to produce Symbol Signs — a standardized set of 34 symbols for the Interstate Highway System. Five years later, 16 more symbols were added to complete what’s become known as “the Helvetica of pictograms” — a 50-piece symbol set so iconic and universally pervasive it has become an integral part of our visual language.

But beyond their practical application, Symbol Signs have amassed a cultish following in the design community, generating derivative work ranging from the quirky to the wildly creative.

Artist Iain Anderson’s symbol-based short film, Airport, was a finalist in the 2005 Sydney Film Festival. And Norwegian designer Timo Arnall created The Adventures of Helvetica Man — a Flickr set paying tribute to the main hero of the Symbol Signs.

A few weeks ago, we tweet-raved about Symbolic Gestures — a wonderful exposé on all the creative ways in which the National Park Service has adapted the iconic symbols to convey a wide and incredibly rich range of contexts.

And non-traditional eco getup Green Thing used Symbol Signs as a storytelling device in a brilliant short film for one of their seven green actions, Walk The Walk.

Download the 50 original Symbol Signs from the AIGA website — they’ve been released into the public domain, free and available with no copyright in EPS and GIF formats — and see what story you can weave.

Whether you get stuck or inspired, it’s worth checking out 1,000 Icons, Symbols, and Pictograms: Visual Communications for Every Language — a fantastic book on, well, exactly what the title promises.

via the wonderful idsgn blog

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Fun For Good: The Indie Rock Coloring Book

Staying outside the lines, or what Rilo Kiley’s latest haircuts have to do with charity.

Indie music defines itself through the colorful quirk of its artists and evangelists. Without that, it would blend in with the grey mediocrity of the mainstream. For the past two years, obscenely talented UK illustrator Andy J. Miller has been working on a project that celebrates this whimsy. Today, he finally releases the Indie Rock Coloring Book — a wonderful collection of hand-illustrated activity pages, mazes, connect-the-dots, and coloring pages for indie icons like Bloc Party, The Shins, Iron & Wine, Broken Social Scene, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, The New Pornographers, The National, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Published by Montreal-based creative nonprofit Yellow Bird Project, the book is brimming with delightful indie rock inside jokes and comes with a cherry-on-top foreword by YBP band Rilo Kiley.

All proceeds go to Yellow Bird’s charitable mission, so pony up those measly $10, buy yourself some fun, and show your favorite artists some indie camaraderie.

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The Ancient Book of Sex and Science

The alchemy of erotica, or what’s making Walt Disney blush in his grave.

This summer, four insanely talented Pixar animators — Scott Morse, Nate Wragg, Lou Romano, and Don Shank — got together and released a racy side project exploring, in broad color and evocative commentary, humanity’s most popular topic from the least likely of angles.

The Ancient Book of Sex & Science was born.

In 80 whimsical pages, the collection of vintage-inspired artwork is a voyage into the human mind, with all of its carnal obsessions and romantic mythologies.

The book traces the full spectrum of sex and science — sex and aliens, sex and robots, sex and math, sex and the tools of innovation, sex and the Atomic Age — with pure, playful whimsy that disarms any preconceptions of vulgarity.

As I began working on this book, I found myself heavily inspired by the cover artwork of old science books. A favorite series of mine is the “How and Why Wonder Books.” As I looked over the entire series, I thought to myself, “There is no Sex and Science issue.” This gave me the perfect excuse to create my own volume for the series. The end result is the long lost “Sex and Science” edition that was never published. ~ Nate Wragg for Nerve

The Ancient Book of Sex & Science is the second in a series grouped around themes the animators couldn’t explore in their regular work. The first, titled The Ancient Book of Myth and War, sold out in a matter of weeks and is now available — and priced — as a collector’s item.

Miraculously, Amazon still has this one.

The Pixar team is planning two more.

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Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life

Birds, insects, monkeys, and 12.6 pounds of design genius.

If you think of nature illustration as the sterile visuals of a science book, you haven’t seen the work of Charlie Harper. The iconic American modernist, famous for his spunky stylized wildlife illustrations, spent more than six decades adorning books and posters with his highly distinctive artwork.

In 2001, New York based designer Todd Oldham — a legend in his own right — rediscovered Charley’s work and decided to comb through his ample archive, collaborating closely with Harper to curate, edit and design a book that captures the iconic style of the great master. When Charley passed away in 2007 at the age of 84, Oldham went on to publish Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life — a magnificent coffee table tome full of illustrations in Harper’s unique self-described “minimal realism.”

The book is massive tribute to Harper’s work — literally. At 12.6 pounds, the 424-page A3 monster is a dramatic, visually gripping antidote to today’s nano-culture. It’s also a lovely reminder that — as much as we love the interwebs — experiencing artwork on the screen is just never quite the same as the rich, lush, tactile glory of perfect print.

Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life comes as a must-have for the serious design aficionado — so snag it for your own library, or as a certain-to-floor gift for a visually passionate other.

via Melexodus

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