Symbolic Gestures. How, exactly, does a simple picture go about telling you, "Be careful here. It's cold, and sometimes ice forms on the roof, and it can fall off, and it can be sharp, and that can hurt you"? Inspired by the upcoming Ken Burns documentary, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Jesse Smith of The Smart Set examines the pictograph designs that convey important information to park visitors. [more inside]
posted by amyms on Jul 31, 2009 - 35 comments

J.R. Williams is a prolific comics artist with a distinctive visual style 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. He is fond of fanciful takes on pop culture icons like Quisp and Yogi Bear, as well as more ribald characterizations like Polly Purebred and Jane Jetson (NSFW) More recently he has branched out into abstraction, which might be characterized as psychedelic pictographs.
posted by Tube on Jul 5, 2008 - 4 comments

According to the LA Times, "[g]raffiti is a growing part of the landscape as taggers deface parks and canyons" in California. While the tone of the article was overwhelmingly negative towards the pictographs, people have been painting on these same rocks for millenia. Ancient pictographs and petroglyphs add to our understanding of what the people who lived before us were like; won't contempory pictographs help future anthropologists understand us?
posted by hellx on Aug 25, 2005 - 62 comments