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…

Amusings & other creations (from the early web)

Amusings & other creations (from the early web)

I have been blogging for 15 years now, but I have had a website for much longer than that. I built my first website back in 1998 just as I was graduating from UIUC and entering the academic job market. I still remember the URL (www.uiuc.edu/~pmishra). I designed a...

Sketches of life

I have had a Wacom tablet for a while now but haven't really gotten down to playing with it... till a couple of days ago. I started with rough drawings / sketches of friends and family. Take a look and let me know what you think.... You can click on the images to see...

TPACK moving in international circles

My friend, Martin Oliver, over at the London Knowledge Lab sent me the following link about a TPACK related publication that appeared in the International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology, aka IJEDUICT. (Boy, that's a...

My journey through design: Keynote at IDC

My journey through design: Keynote at IDC

Design is core to my identity, to who I am. Education is the space within which I function but I try to approach everything I do as a designer. This was not always the case. Back in 1984, I had just graduated with an undergraduate degree in engineering, and if there...

When does the brain make up YOUR mind?

When does the brain make up YOUR mind? Does this question make any sense? Anyway, this was prompted by an article that showed that "Researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making...

A defining moment!

I started blogging at the beginning of this year - January 1, 2008 4 days later, when Obama won the Iowa caucuses, I a posted a video of his speech, and asked a simple question, "Is this a defining moment of our time?" See it here Almost exactly six months later, on...

Let children play: From evolutionary psychology to creativity

Let children play: From evolutionary psychology to creativity

As a part of our ongoing series on creativity we recently spoke with Dr. Peter Gray, professor of Psychology at Boston College. Dr. Gray’s interest in creativity emerges as a consequence of his background in evolutionary psychology and interest in how humans (and...

A couple of images… (for the heck of it)

Here are two images I created recently... August is the 8th month, so here is a little design to celebrate that fact! I had no particular reason to create this... but then again why let that get in the way of doing something... anything! The next is an image based on...

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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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