LanguageART: Meaning making through type & image

by | Monday, September 03, 2018

I love collecting quotations—usually related to learning, design, and creativity. Over the past couple of years I started trying to visualize these quotations, playing with type and image, to tease apart their meanings, sometimes to undermine, sometimes to enhance. I call these verbo-visual experiments LanguageART (shout out to Danah Henriksen for the suggestion).

Of course, there are rules to the game, certain self-imposed constraints within which I choose to play. By their very nature these rules are arbitrary, as rules for games should be. For instance, all of these images are created in Keynote, Apple’s equivalent of Powerpoint. It is not that I do not have access to other more powerful graphic design software but in some sense using a presentation software to create something relatively interesting and sophisticated is the challenge. Similarly the only font I am allowed to use is Futura (and its different weights)—though this is a rule I have violated on occasion (but rarely). I also restrain myself to a relatively tight color palette, but again this is a rule I have broken a few times. Over the past two years, I have created hundreds of designs, poured hours of my life into them—usually at meetings—and, till recently have not shared them widely. That changes now. Enjoy.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Fibonacci’s Poem

Fibonacci’s Poem

Fibonacci’s PoemDecember 10, 2019 (!)OneWordIt startsSlow but sureExpanding out numerically, adding moreMarching forward, doing the math, not asking why Knowing the ratio of words, in this line and previous, will equal Phi!A number, elegant, emergent, magical; found...

TED is bullshit 🙂

Evrim Baran (who I often joke is the only reader of this blog) sent me this link to a set of notes by Jeff Jarvis from a TED talk he recently gave. He says that he used the opportunity of a TED event to question the TED format, especially in relation to education,...

Of raindrops and dying flowers

Of raindrops and dying flowers

The rainfall in June –the poems I’ve pasted to wallspeel off, but leave traces.~ Basho All photos taken with my iPhone8©punyamishra

Election 2.0

An op-ed in today's NYTimes by William Poundstone about how the web can be used during an election to prevent election fraud. As the article describes a computer scientist and a mathematician "have proposed an ingenious method that would combine paper ballots and a...

Modeling human behavior: The new dark art of silicon sampling

Modeling human behavior: The new dark art of silicon sampling

A couple of months ago I had written this post, On merging with our technologies – which was essentially quotes from a conversation Ezra Klein had with the novelist Mohsin Hamid. I finished the post with a quote speaking the dangers of predictive technologies on human...

The Allegory of the Cave

Plato's Allegory of the Cave (see Wikipedia entry) illustrates "our nature in its education and want of education." It is maybe one of the most famous allegories in literature and philosophy, a precursor to the kinds of mind-games (think brain in a vat) that...

Ganesh, new ambigram, & old video

Ganesh, new ambigram, & old video

One of the big parts of my life over the past decade or more, has been the Ganesh Festival celebrations in Lansing with friends and family—Good food and good times. Of course this year I have to miss all the fun - being here in Phoenix. I have kept up with all...

The tensions inherent in creativity

The tensions inherent in creativity

The next article in our series (Rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century) for the journal Tech Trends is now available online. This article has an interview with Dr. Mark Runco, Distinguished Research Fellow of the American...

TPACK in Science Ed (Video)

Jamie Smith at Ohio University has created a Prezi presentation on TPACK in Science Education. I think it is a pretty good introduction to the topic. Enjoy

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  1. Design: Fixing clocks | Negotiating Systems | Talking About Design - […] is a design I created a year (or more) ago, with this quote, as part of my LanguageArt […]
  2. Design: Fixing clocks | Negotiating Systems – Punya Mishra's Web - […] is a design I created a year (or more) ago, with this quote, as part of my LanguageArt […]

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