Continuing our successful booksourcing — thanks for all the museum tickets! Including the one all the way from Breda — we have a new challenge: a) Clever interpretations and b) parodies or riffs of the ubiquitous man and woman bathroom icons. An example of category “a” would be these icons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and one for category “b” would be this animation using most of the famed AIGA Symbol Signs. Let the recommendations flow in the comments.
oh, and...
http://flickr.com/photos/thornyc/2825365634/
Seen at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, May 2008
On Sep.03.2008 at 11:55 AMHere's what we use. (note: Scrappy-Doo was unavailable...)
I think I was bored one week and developed an ongoing set of stick men. Only the very last one on stickmen-1 is decent enough to use. Unless there are bathrooms for snowmen at malls and restaurants.
some of those probably fit category b, mainly the ones on "page 9". not meant in a racist way or anything, but they just feel so weird to a me - way too much personality, but i guess thats whats added when you localize pictograms.
On Sep.03.2008 at 12:40 PMI designed this spread as part of a school project to highlight the discrepancy in our ideas of graphic "neutrality". To wit, the "woman" icon is used twice in the standard ISOTYPE set, once to denote the female toilets, and the more telling instance, behind the service counter.
On Sep.03.2008 at 03:08 PMI've been collecting these for a while now, but here is a Flickr pool:
On Sep.03.2008 at 03:14 PMThor, the Mies icon portrait looked familiar... And, indeed, 2x4 did it for the IIT campus back in 1999. Still, a good call.
Pesky, nice stuff!
Su, I shouldn't have expected anything less from you : )
Thanks for all the great recommendations.
On Sep.03.2008 at 11:15 PMDresser Johnson made some great wayfinding icons for the Museum of Modern Art, including the bathroom signage.
On Sep.03.2008 at 11:35 PMNow that I understand the gist of this thread I'm so sorry for sending pictograms of aliens and such. What was I thinking?
On Sep.04.2008 at 06:51 PMHere are some bathroom icons we created and applied to the Graphic Design building at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Here are some bathroom icons we created and applied to the Graphic Design building at the Kansas City Art Institute.
But wait, there's more!
Just got back from Pixar, where I spied these fine examples...
They go beyond the bathroom icons, but I enjoyed 2x4's riffs on the icons currently on display at MoMA:
http://thornyc.livejournal.com/342926.html
These are my own no-flash-photography-allowed photos. A few more can be found by other artlovers on flickr, but I was unable to find better documentation on this project on the web, or at 2x4's skimpy website.
(This reminds me that I failed to dig out my museum tags to send you. Hopefully someone else contributed a vintage MoMA one.)
On Sep.03.2008 at 11:46 AM