MetaFilter posts tagged with symbols

☃ [unicode table for you]

not_on_display — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:36:29 -0800

⍾ LI'L MUSHROOM GUY
⎌ LEAP-FROGGIN' O's
☣☮ BIOHAZARDOUS HIPPIE WARNING
∰ THREE VIOLINS SHARING HULA HOOP
☃ Unicode table for you: with sliders to help you whiz through all those characters you didn't even know you had. ☃
⫷ All symbols in the table have links underneath them which lead to active Wikipedia Pages. ⫸
[ previously ① ⓑ ☠, via ]
␄

Please Call Me Hararie

netbros — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:54:40 -0800

Japanese Element Symbols is an introduction for non-Japanese to the Japanese language through Kanji symbols, its alphabet, elements of Japan's culture, and what to expect on the culinary front.

Watch out for falling icicles, Helvetica Man!

amyms — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:12:07 -0800

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. Previously: Gerd Arntz and the origins of the stick figure Related: The Rise of Helvetica Man The Adventures of Helvetica Man on Flickr

The simplest and earliest forms of communication

cashman — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:00:18 -0800

A video of 2000 Symbols set to the Cool Kids via Matchstic.

You Are My Type

netbros — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:23:09 -0800

The Ministry of Type is a weblog about type, typography, lettering, calligraphy and other related things. The FontFeed, from the folks at FontShop, is a daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world. Articles of interest in the archives include: Passenger and pedestrian symbols created in the early 20th Century; as part of the Isotype project set up by Otto Neurath to provide information to the often-illiterate proletariat. Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more likely these days, mathematically. Travel posters promoting travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age. It’s not just the latest font technology, but also the most advanced, poised to replace the old TrueType and PostScript formats. Embrace the open type hype. The best contemporary handwriting typefaces in various writing styles — from print to cursive, simple to swashy. Sometimes, flat just doesn’t cut it, and we need to find other, more attractive ways to present designs. Tutorial: Photorealistic Perspective

In case your system's fonts don't support the snowman.

TheOnlyCoolTim — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:15:23 -0800

Decodeunicode.org has a useful and full-featured search for the names and glyphs for those Unicode characters that display as a plain box full of despair. It is presented by the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. Roll the dice ⚅⚄ and try it out. I hear if you know the secret hexadecimal number you can find an Obama glyph. Comment with the funniest candidate wins the internet.

Alchemistry

cthuljew — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:24:16 -0800

Despite some rather interesting biographical information, Iridius’s interest in typographical symbols is noteworthy, especially the section on alchemical ones.

Mixed Messages?

StrikeTheViol — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 15:03:47 -0800

This strange mixture of meanings and symbols confuses me. maybe it's just that some of the ideas are confusingly named.

Picasso and the Minotaur - an animated short

madamjujujive — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 11:14:14 -0800

Minotauromaquia - a stop motion animated short set to Stravinsky's in which Picasso confronts the minotaur and some other painted characters come to life. The image of the Minotaur is a recurring symbol of self in Picasso's works. (main link via Milinkito [more])

wide right turns

signal — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 16:33:34 -0800

You see, when large trucks make a right turn, they swing a little bit wide to the left first. Simple idea. Many ways to express it. God bless us all.

A Brief History Of The Clenched Fist

jack_mo — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:20:49 -0800

A Brief History Of The Clenched Fist. With illustrations.

Symbols

blahblahblah — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 07:54:52 -0800

✙ ☪ ◊? The addition of a third protective symbol (fourth, if you count this happy lion) will allow the Magen David Adom of Israel to join the Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies after over 50 years. It might look odd, but a lot of other symbols we take for granted have interesting recent origins. ☮ was designed in 1958. ☣ was created by Dow in 1966. ☢ first appeared as a doodle in the 1940s. The symbols of the planets have many origins, but here on earth, the origins of ☺ remain so convoluted that it might take a fictional "symbologist" to sort it all out.

This is not a self link.

?! — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 11:39:16 -0800

? , !, & @ .

Not getting symbolism

Tlogmer — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 09:23:13 -0800

"Almost half the children committed one or more of these mistakes. They attempted with apparent seriousness to perform the same actions with the miniature items that they had with the large ones. Some sat down on the little chair: they walked up to it, turned around, bent their knees and lowered themselves onto it. Some simply perched on top, others sat down so hard that the chair skittered out from under them. Some children sat on the miniature slide and tried to ride down it, usually falling off in the process; others attempted to climb the steps, causing the slide to tip over. (With the chair and slide made of sturdy plastic and only about five inches tall, the toddlers faced no danger of hurting themselves.)"

Hidden from History?

amberglow — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 14:20:04 -0800

Claudette Colvin --a Montgomery teen arrested 9 months before Rosa Park's now-famous refusal to sit in the back of the bus. There were 4 women who stood up before Mrs. Parks, yet most of us know nothing about them. It was their actions that led to the Supreme Court overturning segregation on public transit, yet Rosa Parks is the visible symbol. On worthy and "unworthy" messengers and symbols.

More than one way to look at this?

spock — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 21:05:12 -0800

These people are apparently unaware that the swastika was not a Nazi symbol in 1880. Is there more than one way to look at this? One Jew's perspective.

A symbolic gesture, yet sincere in the offering

DeepFriedTwinkies — Fri, 27 May 2005 21:02:43 -0800

Symbol fun. Happy Friday.

The year the stars fell: Lakota Winter Counts

madamjujujive — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 07:47:58 -0800

Lakota Winter Counts. Lakota and other plains tribes counted time by winters. An appointed recorder would choose one major event to mark the year, depicting that event by name and symbol. Early records dating back to the 10th century were often painted on buffalo skins; more recent winter counts were recorded as text journals. These fascinating records offer insight into natural and historic events for our land that precede accounts of European settlers. - more -

It all starts by looking a baby right in the eyes

languagehat — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 14:49:07 -0800

Language started with emotional signaling. That's the thesis of a new book, The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker.

Lived emotional experience is key to language learning, the authors suggest. "Mathematicians and physicists may manipulate abstruse symbols representing space, time, and quantity, but they first understood those entities as tiny children wanting a far-away toy, or waiting for juice, or counting cookies. The grown-up genius, like the adventurous child, forms ideas through playful explorations in the imagination, only later translated into the rigor of mathematics."

The book is very ambitious, and I don't think we'll ever know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky's deus ex machina "language gene" mutation.

Color communication & symbolism

madamjujujive — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 03:58:58 -0800

Colors in motion - an animated and interactive experience of color communication and symbolism. (flash. via One's web)

Rongorongo!

Ogre Lawless — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 14:04:17 -0800

Rongorongo! Say it twice -- don't it feel nice? Most people think of the enigmatic maoi when they think of Easter Island but an equally vexing mystery is found in twenty-six wooden objects which contain pictographic symbols comprising...what? A language? A mnemomic system for recording stories now long forgotten? A resource for modern primitives' tribal tatoos? We could ask, but the authors are long-gone -- the victims of hard times -- leaving only a few tablets and a bunch of carved stone to puzzle over.

What's YOUR favourite ascii fart? \m\ (-_-) /m/

holloway — Sat, 15 Nov 2003 18:52:28 -0800

Ascii Farts.

Hate on display.

111 — Wed, 23 Jul 2003 00:01:59 -0800

Hate on display. The Anti-Defamation League has a visual database of symbols devised or co-opted by neo-Nazis and supremacist groups worldwide, as well as numbers and acronyms with racist connotations. Although most of us know what 88 means, there's also info about others such as the communist-separatist American Front and the Five Percenters. More neo-Nazi flags here; flags and badges here. Please remember: while racism is always immoral, symbols themselves can have several meanings.

swastika

hama7 — Sun, 17 Nov 2002 02:33:51 -0800

The Swastika, Swastika links, and a complete index.

BGM — Tue, 27 Aug 2002 19:15:49 -0800

Did you know "88" means "Heil Hitler"? Neither did a buyer at Target. "August 27, 2002 -- Target, the nationwide department-store chain, said today it will pull shorts and baseball caps emblazoned with neo-Nazi hate symbols from its shelves." After dithering for a few weeks, Target responded to tolerance.org's campaign, but is now shooting themselves in the foot again by being less than accomodating of returns of the offending (and I do mean offending!) product. The link above is to the original story, the Aug. 27 update is linked at the bottom of that page. Howcum I never saw this on CNN? 8