icons icons icons! readings and bloggings and icons.

before i get to my new icons, there's some housekeeping to attend to. i am late on some readings/a watching, and i need to blog about that. because i detest excuses, i won't make any, but i would like to relay the following anecdotal fact about the matter because it seems fitting in an amusing way.

i started trying to blog about these readings when they were assigned, quite some time ago. as you perhaps have noticed, for good or ill, it's pretty uncommon for me to struggle with coming up with something to say. which is why it was kind of puzzling when i took some notes and tried to blog, with no success. so i set it aside to try again later. lather, rinse, repeat, until today, whereupon i decided to call myself out about the situation.

perhaps i've got it figured out: it's hard to talk about icons.

would that be just perfect? the purpose of an icon, since the earliest humans used a thing to represent a different thing, has been to communicate without speaking. the most elegant icons say everything there is to be said about a situation without requiring any additional explanation. to be perfectly legible without relying on language. to indicate clear, direct facts, without getting all muddled up in opinions and history. icons exist continuously in the present, despite their long, industrious lifespans. they have the capacity, even, to express values, although that might be less intrinsic in their usage. they can condense behaviors, ideas, individuals, objects, lives, anything, into one purely distilled image. not a snapshot of specificity, but the broadest, most indicative fragments available combined into one profoundly communicative whole.

you can say lots of things about icons.
but the idea, i think, if everything goes swimmingly, is that maybe you won't need to.

now, wanna see mine? they're all fancy vectorfied now, eagerly awaiting their refinements and continuations.

where we last left off, i wasn't sure which direction i was going to pursue. my two strongest were the high contrast/3D spray-stencils, and the flat-front/rounded corners that were sliced into black and white. both of those options really started to get at the values of dj culture in a way that none of the other things i had been trying really were. what it came down to (after pursuing both until literally the last moment of the class wherein we decided on our final direction) was that the spray stencil loses its spray at small scale. being icons, it's critical they can scale... and those just didn't look like much once they got little.

so the remix-slice it is. and here they are! i've eliminated the road case (not very 'iconic,' if you will) and the record (redundant because i'm using a flat-front, single turntable icon which displays the record quite prominently).

mixer

macbook

headphones

microphone

turntable

speaker (this one... oh goodness. i have so many pages trying to distill speakers into their most communicative aspects. they are rectangles and circles. if you try to put a horn in at the top, like i kept trying to do, then they look like ipods. if the two circles are close to the same size, they look like turntables. i tested so, so many speakers on my studiomates (thanks everybody) and this one got the best results.

& synthesizer. woohoo digital! they look so clean and scaleable!