I think about iconography a lot, I have multiple twitter threads about them. I’ll eventually expand this into a blogpost and probably subsequently do a youtube video about them too.
The core thing that makes me obsessed about iconography is the idea that you can reverse-engineer successful icons, and create icons in the public domain. This is something at the intersection of advertising, marketing, PR, oratory, nation-building, world building, everything.
What is the essence of iconography? How do you create an icon?
Simplistically speaking, you have to create some images, and they have to really resonate with people. It’s unlikely that any image will resonate universally, so you’ll have to focus on resonating with some subgroup of people, some niche. Ideall you pick a niche that you yourself are a genuine member of, that’s the only way you get any kind of real depth. You have to have done the reading, be familiar with the texts, or the songs, or the images, whatever the mediums are– you want to know what the vibe is. And then you want to define, articulate, convey something that’s bold and evocative.
I wouldn’t claim that I’ve made really powerful visual icons yet. I have made some attempts. There’s the FAN king-of-the-nerds iconspace, there’s the Frame Studies Matrix Glasses iconspace…