Index

A global acronym for “All Cops are Bastards”, a message of resistance against the forces of police brutality, rampant capitalism, oppressive patriarchy, and authoritarianism. Although its origins are unknown, the acronym has gained prominence in several political movements ranging from Occupy, the Yellow Jackets, and Black Lives Matter as well as subcultural scenes like punk and hip-hop. Often devices are used to disguise the devices such as the numbers 1312, the musical notes “A” “C” “A” “B” or stand-in phrases such as All Cats Are Beautiful. 

Aerial Calibration Targets, developed by the Air Force and NASA, are large concrete plots with painted white lines of various lengths, used to test resolution for aerial photography. The most common design, known as 5:1 aspect Tri-bar Array is used as well for testing other photographic devices such as microscopes, scanners, and commercial cameras. While there are dozens of these targets scattered across the US, a majority can be found at the Edwards Air Force Base also known as the photo resolution range.

The African American Flag is an artwork  by David Hammons created in 1990 for the Black USA exhibition at Amsterdam’s Museum Overholland. The red, black, and green palette references the Pan-African flag created by members of the UNIA in 1920.

The African Reference alphabet was first created in 1978 at a UNESCO conference in Niger in an attempt to use single letters (rather than letter combinations) to represent a sound.  The alphabet was later revised in 1982 as a unicase system.

Josef Albers is a German artist and educator who played an instrumental role in the development of contemporary art education today. While Albers worked across a variety of media, he is perhaps best known for his series Homage to the Square (1950–1975) and his book Interaction of Color (1953). His practice was highly focused on education, and was a faculty member of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University. Together his body of work and teaching experience have had a profound effect on our understanding of art and design today: from color to concept, perception to practice.

An ambigram is a unique visual form with multiple interpretations as written words. Looking at an ambrigram one is able to seamlessly shift from one reading to the next by altering one’s “perceptual bias”. An ambigram can be thought of as a form of multistability.

Ambush Marketing is a technique where an unofficial sponsor creates a publicity stunt, generally around a big event, to draw attention often times at the expense of the official sponsors. 

Andinkra are a set of symbols from Ghana that represent various phrases, ideas, or aphorisms. These marks serve as ornament in situations like ceramics, fabric, or architecture and are used to communicate wisdom or valued beliefs. 

Animation smears are used to convey movement and mimic speed through the elongation of a shape or repeated sequence of images. First used by animators to save time spent on drawing distinct frames, today smears are frequently deployed hyperbolically, to comic effect—as when Spongebob Squarepants appears to stutter across the scene. Debates around proper smear etiquette range widely, with some who view its current usages excessive, a trope that should be reserved as a special treat.

Another River is a stream in Alaska named in 1927 after geologists had already named so many other rivers.

An aptronym is a name that has an interesting relationship to the person it belongs to. Notable aptronyms include Jules Angst (a professor who studied anxiety), Usain Bolt (Olympic sprinter), Christopher Coke (notable drug lord), Larry Speaks (Ronald Reagan’s White House press secretary), William Headline (Washington Bureau Chief for CNN), Chris Moneymaker (poker champion), and Anthony Weiner (politician involved in sexting scandals). There are also Inaptronyms where the name has an ironic relationship to the person it belongs to. These include Rob Banks (British police officer) and Jamie Sin (Catholic cardinal).

Asemic writing is an open-ended style of writing where form does not carry specific semantic definition. The shape, gesture, and context however do create associations with writing, thus differentiating the practice from the broader field of abstract art. Without specific intent, asemic writing can be considered writing for the sake of writing where the void of meaning is filled by the viewer’s own interpretation. 

Automatic Writing is a form of writing uninhibited by logic and reason. It is often believed that words produced in this practice derive form supernatural forces or from deep within the subconscious.

Backmasking is a process in which a sound or message is hidden by recording it backwards onto a track. The Beatles popularized backmasking on their album Revolver, and were subsequently thought to have backmasked messages about Paul McCartney’s falsely reported death on the track Revolution 9. Several other bands have been accused of backmasking Satanic messages onto their records such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Britney Spears.

A backronym is the opposite of an acronym. Where as an acronym is a word created from a commonly used phrase (ZIP code from “Zone Improvement Plan” code), a backronym starts with a word and later injects originating terminology. A backronym for COP, for example, is “Constable On Patrol”. This derivation, however, is incorrect was created after the word itself. 

Gilbert Baker was an artist, gay rights activist, and designer of the rainbow flag, the world-wide symbol of the LGBTQ movement. Having learned to sew from a fellow activist, Baker used his skills to create protest banners and flags, later finding employment with Paramount Flag Company. Conceiving of the rainbow flag collectively in 1978, Baker refused to trademark it, hoping it would continue to proliferate in support of the LGBT community. Also a drag performer, Baker’s stage name  “Busty Ross” referenced the American flag’s creator Betsy Ross. 

Beghilos (or calculator spelling) are words created using numerals from displays on devices like a calculator. The most common, dating back to the 1970s, is 5318008 which when turned upsidedown reads “BOOBIES”. Using beghilos it is possible to form over 200 words. 

Susi and Ueli Berger were Swiss designers whose work is most best known for departing from modernism and exploring ideas related to found objects, pop-culture, humor, and curiosity. Their furniture explored such playful concepts as a chair made from the letters in “Stuhl” (Chair) and table from the letters “Tisch”  (Table).

The Bézier curve is based on mathematical principles called the Bernstein polynomials, which were established in 1912. It was not until the 1960s, however, that these concepts gained wide-spread attention when put to use by French engineer Pierre Bézier who used them to design automobiles for Renault.

The monochrome flag made hip-hop history on the cover of OutKast’s album Stankonia (2000) “hinting at a separate America – a place that exists apart from the country experienced by the masses”. (Paste Magazine) The symbol gained further visibility in Young Jeezy’s “Put On” video and cover for his album The Recession (2008). The flag was frequently flown at protests for Freddie Gray’s death in police custody (2015) and appeared on the poster for the Spike Lee film, BlacKkKlansman (2018).

“Xavlegbmaofffassssitim­iwoamndutro­abcwapwaeii­ppohfffX” is an abbreviation for the Goregrind band with an actual name far too crass to divulge in this index. The band logo is widely considered to be the most complex form of black metal lettering in existence. 

Blank sheets of paper, signs, posters, or banners are often used as a form of protest when the message or cause is implicitly understood within a specific cultural context. By using blank canvases, protesters can make a statement while reducing the risk of persecution by authorities. Notable examples include A Protest for Nothing in Toronto (1969), demonstrations against Hong Kong’s national security law (2019–2020), and protests against the arrest of anti-monarchy demonstrators in the UK (2022), among others.

Bliss is a photograph taken by Charles O’Rear in 1996 depicting a Napa Valley landscape. The image was purchased by Bill Gates and used as the default desktop background for the Window’s XP operating system. Given the reach of Microsoft it can be assumed that billions of people have seen this photograph making it possibly the most viewed image in history. For the full image rights, Microsoft offered O’Rear the second largest payout ever made to a single photographer. 

Blotter art refers to the intricate designs printed on perforated sheets of paper used to distribute LSD. These designs encompass a vast range of themes, from pop culture and politics to minimalist and highly elaborate artwork. The Blotter Barn, curated by Mark McCloud in San Francisco, houses the most extensive collection of blotter paper and is widely known as the “Institute of Illegal Images.”

Bluetooth technology is named after Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, the 10th century king of Denmark who was given the nickname from a dead tooth with a blueish hue. The technology hoped to unite devices in the way that Gormsson united the tribes of Denmark. The Bluetooth logo was made by combining the runic characters H (ᚼ) and B (ᛒ).

A Book Curse is a technique employed in medieval times to discourage the theft of manuscripts by invoking the threat of excommunication, punishment, or death upon the perpetrator. An example of a book curse, which might be found in a first or last page colophon, is: Steal not this book my honest friend / For fear the gallows should be your end / And when you die the Lord will say / And where’s the book you stole away?

The Bouba/KiKi effect is a verbal-to-visual mapping of sounds and shapes first developed by the psychologist Wolfgang Kohler in 1929. Kohler, in his experiment, showed two forms to partipants: one star-like with jagged points, the other round and bulbous, and asked which was called “takete” and which was called “baluba”. A large marjority of partipants associated “takete” with the sharp form and “baluba” with the round demonstrating an inherent association between sound and shape.

A writing system in which alternate lines are written in reverse, meaning, one line is read right to left and the next left to right. Boustrophedon (literally translated to “to turn like an oxen”) was a technique used by the Greeks, Etruscans, Luwians, and the Indus Valley civilization. A form of boustrophedon was as well used on the Rongorongo tablets found on Easter Island where one line was written right-side up, and the next up-side-down. 

Bubble Porn is a photoshop technique in which images of clothed individuals are covered using circular patterns to conceal their outfits making them appear nude. The trend began in 2007 on the Japanese website 2channel and has been referred to by various other names such as “Marble Collage”, “Worm-eaten Collage”, “Perforated Collage”, and “Looking Like Naked Photos”.

Buffing is the technique of removing graffiti by painting over it. Often times the new paint does not match the original wall color which results in the creation of unintentional abstract compositions. 

A Calligram is an image or graphic created from a related text. 

Adopting the same camouflage technique as German U-boats, car manufacturers have turned to dazzle patterns to skin unreleased car prototypes in order to hide elements from a curious public. The black and white patterns make the automobile’s form difficult to distinguish for an onlooker or competing brand. 

In 2007, Alexander Overwijk’s video of him drawing a perfect circle by hand went viral, prompting the first World Freehand Circle Drawing Championship in Ottawa, Ontario. Contestants of the championship use the span of their arm fully extended as a compass to draw near-perfect circles on a chalkboard. The results are evaluated using a laser tool that calculates the difference between a machine-made circle and the drawing. The person with the smallest area difference between the two is declared the world champion. 

As part of a larger environmental effort against air and water pollution, São Paulo passed the Lei Cidade Limpa (Clean City Law) in 2006 to combat the “visual pollution” of outdoor advertising. The regulation banned outdoor ads resulting in the removal of over 315,000 billboards and signs.

The Coexist logo was created in 2000 by Polish designer Piotr Mlodozeniec in a contest for the Museum of the Seam in Jerusalem. In its original iteration, the sign featured three symbols: the moon “C” for Islam, the Star of David “X” for Judaism, and the cross for T for Christianity. Five years after its creation the logo had been modified and used for a fashion label without the permission of Mlodozeniec and a legal battle over the trademark ensued. The logo was then featured prominently in the DVD packaging for the band U2, officially enshrining its place in popular culture. As the logo was endlessly repurposed on bumper stickers it continued to amass new symbols leaving the wordmark a cluttered mess far from the Mlodozeniec’s original design. 

A Constructed Language is one that is consciously created for a specific purpose as opposed to on that has been developed organically. These systems can be created for a variety of reasons including: improving general communication, facilitating communication within a specialized field, or an element of a fictional universe.

A countermark (also referred to as punchmark or counterstamp) is an element added into the face of a coin while in circulation. Reasons for countermarking include adjusting the value of a coin, marking foreign currency as legal tender, and making a political statement against the regime in power.

A Crowd Formation is the creation of words or images through mass gatherings of people. 

Dermatographism is a condition affecting 2–5% of the population, where the skin becomes raised and swollen when rubbed. Because people with this condition can create visible “drawings” on their skin, it is often referred to as “skin writing”.

Desire Path is a walkway formed by human or animal foot traffic and generally represents the fastest or most efficient way to reach a destination.

The act of rotating the rear or front of a vehicle around the opposite set of wheels in continuous motion in order to create a circular skid mark, possibly causing tires against pavement to emit smoke in the process.

First articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, double consciousness refers to the internal conflict experienced by individuals in marginalized groups, in which the oppressed are conditioned to see themselves through the eyes of the oppressor. A peculiar “two-ness,” as Du Bois described, the term has come to be applied more widely as a framework to address dynamics of gender, colonialism, xenophobia and other race issues.

Drainspotting is the act of finding and appreciating the beauty of manhole covers, sewer drains, or other functional elements of the urban environment. Prior to 2016, notable findings of such city elements were posted and discussed on the website of the same name created by Josh and Cam Larios.

The Droste Effect is a potentially infinite image loop of a picture appearing within itself. The effect is named after the dutch brand Droste’s Cocoa whose packaging features a woman holding a tin of Droste’s Cocoa, and on that tin is the same image of the woman holding the tin of Droste’s Cocoa. 

Drunk Tank Pink (255, 145, 175), also known as Baker Miller Pink, is a color proven to reduce hostility, aggression, and anger. In 1979, researcher Alexander Schauss tested the color in a Seattle correctional facility by painting certain cells Baker Miller Pink. His results found a reduced rate of unruly behavior after as little as 15 minutes of exposure. The nickname “Drunk Tank Pink” refers to a potential use of the color in jail holding cells to calm down incoming, inebriated individuals. In 1991, University of Hawaii coach George Lumkin painted the visiting team’s locker rooms Baker Miller Pink in an attempt to make the opposing teams more subdued.

Ducks are buildings that appear as oversized roadside objects that emerged along state highways in the 1950s. Coined by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in their seminal work 1972 Learning From Las Vegas they praised these postmodernist forms as buildings that brazenly wear their function, as opposed to the modernist totems of the era that sought to conceal it. The Big Duck Building in Long Island, New York, shaped like a Peking duck and features taillights for eyes, for example, was once a vessel for the sale of poultry and eggs.

Earthrise is an iconic photograph of the Earth taken from the Moon taken by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. In Life Magazine, wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called Earthrise “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”.

After Brussels was declared the capital of the European Union in 2001, AMO (the research division of Rem Koolhaas’s OMA) was commissioned to advise on the potential of this new appointment. In addition to the architecture AMO proposed a new symbol to bring awareness to the presence of the EU in everyday life. The EU barcode was one such symbol designed to abstract and merge the flags of the EU member states into a single graphic, one that denotes a shared mission despite various local identities. The system as well allows for expansion of the symbol if more states join the EU. 

The Euro “E” symbol was presented as the official currency mark of the EU government in 1997. The mark, derived from the Greek epsilon to symbolize the weight of European civilization, an E for Europe, and two parallel lines representing stability, was created by Arthur Eisenmenger. Yet Eisenmenger’s contribution to the vocabulary European symbols has largely gone unacknowledged, the design instead was credited to a team of “nameless bureaucrats” despite Eisenmenger’s protests. When asked if the designer is hoping for compensation from the government, he declined stating what he would appreciate most is a simple “Thank you”.

Eurostile is a typeface designed by Aldo Novarese in 1962 based off of the all-caps Microgramma designed ten years prior by Alessando Butti. In the marketing of Eurostile Novarese strategically connected the letterforms to ideals of progress, with comparisons to the shape of the television and train windows. As Novarese wrote in Alfa-Beta (1964), “The squared and compact shape is, by now, familiar: it is present and predominant in everything around us. And the typeface today—as in the past—is camouflaged by and blends in with other aesthetic expressions of the contemporary period.” The typefaces relationship with progress and modernity has been cemented by its countless use in Science Fiction films, its appearance “says ‘future’ far more effectively than an expensive effects shot.” (Typeset in the Future).

According to several reputable polls and automobile journals, the Fiat Multipla is widely considered to be the ugliest car ever made.

Fingerspelling is a way to express letters and numbers using the hands. This form of communication is often used in various sign language systems and in deaf education. 

In 1992, CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the first image ever to the internet. The photograph depicted a parody pop band called Les Horribles Cernettes, which consisted of CERN employees and their girlfriends. The company, CERN, a nuclear research center located in Switzerland, is widely considered to have invented the internet.

Gang signs are a way of stating one’s affiliation with a particular crew using a formation of the fingers and hands. Flashing a gang sign is a way of antagonizing a rival, asserting clout, or signaling the intent to “do business”. 

Genericized Trademarks are brands that were once protected under copyright law, but have since lost their protection as a result of the term’s identification with a broader industry or ubiquitous phrase.  Examples of these include “making a Xerox”, or “Googling information”. 

Geoglyphs are large graphics or illustrations made in the landscape using rocks, stone fragments, or other similar materials. These works, authored by a variety of cultures and found around the globe, remain a mystery in regards to their meaning and purpose.

A 12-inch gold-plated copper disk carried aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 and containing sounds and images that NASA selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Engraved on the Golden Record are drawings of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it, with the stylus in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0,70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in. 

Grawlix is a string of typographic symbols used in comics as a stand-in for profanity. The technique was created by Rudolph Dirks in 1902 for his comic Katzenjammer Kids. Note the use of an anchor as one of the symbols, which alludes to the idea of “swearing like a sailor”. The actual term “Grawlix” was coined by Mort Walker (creator of Beetle Baily) first in the article “Let’s Get Down to Grawlixes” in 1964 and later solidified in his book The Lexicon of Comicana published in 1980.

A headfooter, or tadpole person, is a form of human figure without a torso, often drawn by young children. 

An under appreciated and little-known punctuation mark combining an exclamation point with a question mark. The glyph, developed in 1962 by Martin K. Speckter, is often referred to by printers as simply a “bang”.

Jabberwocky is a nonsensical poem by Lewis Carroll from his novel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). The poem, describing the killing of the fictional Jabberwock character, is written in mirror orientation. 

In 1999 Japan redesigned their flag, a red circle in a field of white, to a slightly more vibrant red circle in a field of white. 

Susan Kare is a graphic designer renown for her work on icons and fonts used on the first ever Macintosh computer. Kare was employee number 10 at the company and quickly made a name for herself with her whimsical pixel art (such as the Happy Mac or the System Failure Bomb) that became closely associated with the personality of the brand. Additionally, Kare designed an array of fonts for Mac including the first screen-based proportionately spaced font, Chicago, along with fonts New York, Geneva, Monaco, Cairo, San Francisco, and Toronto. Today Kare is regarded as a trailblazer in the realm of graphical user interfaces and pixel art with her contributions allowing for our interactions with machines to become just a bit more human. 

Kilroy is a fictional male character who’s origins have been debated. Most commonly witnessed as a graffitied cartoon featuring a figure with a prominent nose gripping a wall, often paired with the words “Kilroy was here,” Kilroy is claimed to have been sighted as early as 1936. Often associated with American troops who are known to have left the depiction and phrase at various sites, Kilroy became a popular American symbol during World War II, particularly through association with GIs.

In 1868, Margaret E. Knight invented the paper bag replacing prior carriers such as wooden crates or paper cones. Beyond the bag itself, Knight devised a machine to fold and glue paper to formulate the receptacle. However the idea was stolen by a man named Charles Annan who had spotted Knight developing the bag and quickly beat her to the patent office. Knight took the matter to court and was awarded the patent in 1871. Knight was a prodigy of an inventor, developing 89 unique creations before passing away at the age of 70.

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Also known as a lexigram or ideograph, a lexigraph is a graphical depiction of a single word.

Generally, liminal spaces denote zones of transition. However the term gained popularity on internet message boards as it became used to describe spaces that were empty or abandoned in an eerie way. One particularly well known example of a liminal space was posted on 4chan and is known as “the Backrooms” described as “an empty wasteland of corridors with nothing but ‘the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in’”.

Tools and tricks utilizing the peripheries of language so as to adjust or expand its meaning. These hacks are often unofficial but mutually agreed upon by a particular group. 

Linkrot is the condition in which hypertext links leading from one web page to another no longer function due to expired or defunct sites or pages that have been removed or reorganized. A recent survey has shown that nearly one in every four web pages contains dead or bad links.

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drobwllllantysiliogogogoch, a city in Wales.

Machine Reading (also known as Machine Reading Comprehension, or MRC), is a growing field within AI that aims to equip computers with the ability to read and understand an unstructured text and then answer questions about it. 

A manicule (☛) is a typograhic character depicting a pointing hand. Manicules (also known as pointing hands, bishops fists, or mutton fists along with a variety of other nicknames) originated as hand-drawn illustrations in the margins of books, and were later used in body copy when added into the glyphset of fonts. The earliest use of a manicule is in a 1479 edition of Breviarum totius juris canonici, printed in Milan by Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeller. Over time the manicule became widely used in advertising and has taken on a great many forms including (and perhaps most commonly used today) “👉”.

A Japanese expression referring to a commonly held, but often under-discussed, urge to defecate brought on by entering a bookstore or library. The phenomenon finds its origins in a 1985 letter to the editor in an issue of Book Magazine. Upon being published a large number of readers who had also experienced this effect wrote to the magazine prompting a follow up article in the next issue. 

The iconic green vertical-falling text used to represent the virtual reality environment in 1999 film The Matrix. Composed from mirrored images of Japanese characters and Western Latin letters and numerals, according to the typeface designer Simon Whiteley, the text was made up of sushi recipes composed by his wife who is from Japan. 

Me at the Zoo is the first ever YouTube video uploaded on April 23, 2005. The video features Jawed Karim, YouTube’s co-founder, commenting on elephants at the San Diego Zoo. According to a 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times the video “played a pivotal role in fundamentally altering how people consumed media and helped usher in a golden era of the 60-second video”.

Mirror writing is text shown in the opposite direction from its natural orientation. The technique was originally used as a form of code and carried mystical associations. It now serves more practical purposes such as on ambulances (so that the word appears natural in rearview mirrors of other cars). Notably, Leonardo da Vinci used mirror writing for texts that he wanted to be kept private. 

Mojibake is jumbled text resulting from incorrect text encoding that occurs when moving from one writing system to another. The word “mojibake,” taken from Japanese, translates to “character transformation.” Quite often, mojibake contains the unicode replacement character, “�”.

In 2011, British nature photographer David Slater released a series of self-portraits by monkeys taken during a trip to Indonesia to photograph the endangered primates. The photographs were taken under circumstances carefully orchestrated by Slater. After being published, the “monkey selfies” were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the public domain assuming the monkey (as the author) could not rightfully hold the legal copyright. Slater took issue with Wikimedia stating that he had orchestrated the selfie and thus should be considered the lawful owner. The US Copyright Office ruled against Slater and to this day the images remain in the public domain.

The Moon Museum, created by sculptor Forrest Myers in 1969, is a 1.9 by 1.3 centimeter ceramic tile engraved with artworks by Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol. It is considered to be the first space art object. To create the “museum,” Myers collaborated with engineers from Bell Laboratories to make an edition of ceramic tiles, one of which was affixed to the leg of the Apollo 12 Lunar Module and subsequently left on the moon.

Multistability occurs when a single physical stimulus produces alternations between different subjective percepts. First described in terms of vision as the occurrence of two different stimuli presented to the two eyes, it has since been used to describe other sensory modes, including audition, touch, and olfaction. The key attributes of multistability are that stimuli have more than one plausible perceptual organization and that these organizations may not be compatible with one another. 

The national New Zealand flag looks very similar to the Australian flag, still sporting the Union Jack from when it was a settler colony of the United Kingdom. For these reasons, and because of its representation of British heritage while excluding other ethnic groups, a debate about changing the country’s flag has been ongoing for decades. In 2015 and 2016, the New Zealand Parliament announced a referendum on changing the flag and crowdsourced design suggestions from the public, many of which gained viral success due to their humor or naivete. 

The Nike “swoosh” was designed in 1971 by Carolyn Davidson. The fee for creating the iconic logo was $35.

The use of a device to communicate over long distances such as fire, flags, lights, or machinery.

A palindrome is a sequence that can be read the same forward and backwards and most often take the form of words, numbers, or music. The longest palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is “tattarrattat,” a word coined by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses (1922). Internationally, the Finish word “saippuakivikauppias” meaning “soapstone vendor” is the longest palindrome in everyday use. Perhaps even more extreme are two novels Satire: Veritas by David Stephens (1980) and Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo by Lawrence Levine (1986) written as a complete palindromic work. WOW.

The Pan-African Flag, also called the Marcus Garvey, UNIA, Afro-American or Black Liberation flag, was designed in 1920 to represent people of the African Diaspora and to symbolize Black freedom in the United States. Featuring horizontal red, black and green stripes, the three colors represent the blood of the African people, the people whose existence is affirmed by the flag, and the abundant natural wealth of Africa, respectively. First adopted by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at a conference in New York City, the flag has since been taken up by different organizations advocating for justice and liberation of Black peoples. 

A flourish after a signature, originally used as a precaution against forgery. Paraphs were also employed by medieval rubricators to mark the distinction between manuscript sections. 

Pareidolia is the illusion of something vague and abstract appearing as distinct and familiar. A common instance of pareidolia is seeing faces in objects that are otherwise unrelated. At one point pareidolia was thought to be a symptom of psychosis but today it is understood as commonplace.

In 1985, Tipper Gore created the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) to build awareness and increase control over what music children in America had access to. The PMRC collaborated with the Recording Industry Association of America to add a warning label to music that contained profane content. The first album to contain the label was Banned in the USA (1990) by 2 Live Crew.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) (redundantly: PDF format) is a file format developed by Adobe in the 1990s that captures all of the elements of a printed page—including text formatting and images—in an electronic image that can be viewed, navigated, printed, or forwarded. The format was standardized in 2008 and no longer requires any royalties for its implementation.

Kim Peek is a “mega-savant” who had memorized up to 12,000 books, including the Bible and the Book of Mormon, before his death in 2009. Peek could read two pages in 10 seconds, simultaneously reading the right page with his right eye and the left page with his left eye. Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rainman (1988) is based on Peek.

A Houston-based graphic design firm specializing in Gangsta Rap album covers. The company was started in 1992 by brothers Aaron and Shawn Brauch, and made 19,180 album covers before closing the firm’s doors in 2003. Pen & Pixel album covers are known for their gaudy style and original imagery, often including motifs such as cars, luxury, violence, and women.  

The Penrose triangle (also known as the Penrose tribar, or the impossible tribar) is a triangular impossible object. First created in 1934 by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd, it was popularized by the psychologist Lionel Penrose and his son, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, who described it as “impossibility in its purest form.” An optical illusion that consists of an object that can be depicted in a perspective drawing, but cannot exist as a solid object in real life, it is featured prominently in the works of M.C. Escher and more recently in the logo of skate brand Palace. 

Phonewords are created by replacing the characters in a phone number with the letters assigned to them on a standard telephone keypad. Phonewords are often used as a marketing tool for 1-800 numbers such as 1-800-FLOWERS or 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

A tool used to facilitate automatic writing. In the Victorian ear, the wooden plank was believed to aid in the communication with spirits, producing mysterious messages during seances. The planchette can be seen as the precursor to the ouija board.

PMS 448, described as a “drab dark brown” or “opaque couché,” was voted the ugliest color in the world in a marketing survey from the Australian government. As a result of their findings, the government made PMS 448 the color for cigarette and tobacco packaging in attempts to deter potential consumers. 

In 1993 Prince announced that he would be changing his name to the “Love Symbol,” an unpronounceable icon combining the signs for male and female. The new and confusing name was a protest against his record label which had forced him to adhere to a rigid production schedule. The press especially struggled with the change, referring to the singer as “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince,” and were sent a floppy disk with a custom font containing the icon. In 2000, following the expiration of his record deal, Prince reverted back to his original name.

First popularized by educator and spiritist Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail) in 1861, psychography refers to the writing of spirits by the hand of a medium. Automatic writing is a form of psychography as it supposed that it is guided by an otherworldly spirit. One who does psychography is called a psychographer or a “writer medium.”

The ubiquitous recycling symbol was designed by 23-year-old Gary Dean Anderson who won a nation-wide contest sponsored by the Container Corporation of America in 1970. Anderson, whose family had lived through the Great Depression, instilling him with the value of reuse and renewal from a young age, took inspiration from MC Escher’s Moebius Strip for his design, suggesting unity between “the dynamic (things are changing) and the static (it’s a static equilibrium, a permanent kind of thing).”

A puzzle that combines letters and images to construct a word or phrase.

Revenge Typography covers a specific niche of vandalism generally aimed at cheating partners. In its most common form the betrayed party will tag the offenders car with words or phrases signaling to the public their deceit.

Rongorongo is an early system of writing discovered on Easter Island. The glyphs were inscribed on various pieces of driftwood scattered throughout the landscape. To this day, researchers have yet to produce any meaningful translation.

A stone slab found near Rosetta, Egypt in 1799. Inscribed with three versions of a decree in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and demotic characters, the stone is celebrated as the first clue toward deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. As such, the term is often used as shorthand to refer to an essential clue, breakthrough, or discovery for a new field of knowledge. 

Saccades are the rapid, simultaneous movements of both eyes that abruptly change the point of fixation. As opposed to smooth pursuit of movement, the eyes move in jumps. Saccades can range from the small movements made while reading to the much larger movements made while looking around a room. 

San Serriffe is a 1977 hoax in The Guardian featuring several stories and advertisements surrounding a fictional semi-colon-shaped island in the Indian Ocean. The report is littered with typographical easter eggs such as a capital city named Bodoni, reports on General Baskerville and General Pica, employees fluent in the language of Caslon, a city administrator by the name of Berthold, and a column by the wise Reverend Goudy. The computer scientist Donald Knuth later stated that anyone who could find a mistake in his publications would be rewarded with a “certificate of deposit” from the Bank of San Serriffe. 

The Sator Square is 5-word Latin palindrome dating back to the ruins of Pompeii. It can be read from top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left. Interpreted one way, the square translates to “The farmer Arepo has [as] works wheels [a plough]” or another way “Pater Noster” referring to the Christian prayer “Our Father.” The Sator Square is believed to have been an influence for the 2020 Christopher Nolan film Tenet, which centered around the premise of moving backward and forward in time.

Shorthand is a writing system that seeks to maximize speed and minimize the amount of writing. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos (narrow) and graphein (to write).

A sigil is a magic symbol representing the signature of a spirit or demon. The emblem is considered to be the true name of the entity, granting a magician or witch control over the being. More recently a sigil has been used in chaos magic to represent the desired outcome of a ceremony or ritual.

Sign language is a visual means of communicating using gestures, facial expression, and body language, primarily used by people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Like spoken languages, sign languages are fully-fledged natural languages, meaning that they emerged and evolved naturally over time without too much planning or premeditation, and have their own grammar and lexicon. One of the earliest written records of a sign language is from the fifth century BC, in Plato’s Cratylus, where Socrates says: “If we hadn’t a voice or a tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?” It’s unclear how many sign languages currently exist worldwide, and although there are striking similarities among them, sign languages aren’t universal or mutually intelligible to each other.

A simultaneous punctuation mark invented by science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. It looks like this: “ ⋮ ” According to an entry in Delany’s journals, “A simultaneity mark: “ ⋮ ” means that narrative time has stopped and what happens on both sides of the mark are simultaneous.” As far as we know, Delany never actually made use of his invented punctuation mark in any of his published works.

The round yellow smiley face is the grandfather of all modern emojis. It’s the invention of graphic designer Harvey Ball when he was commissioned by State Mutual Life Assurance to come up with an image for a ‘friendship campaign’ in 1963. In the 1960s and ’70s the symbol took on a life of its own, primarily within the counterculture movement, and since then has been used widely across cultures. In 2011, its digital variant, the emoji, became a feature on smartphones. 

For hundreds of years, shepherds and farmers have used painted “smit marks” to identify their flock while grazing in the field. These colorful “tags” serve a variety of purposes from claiming ownership to tracking health status. 

In 1972 the iconic graffiti artist Phase 2 premiered a lettering style known as “softie” or “bubble letter” which caused a transformational shift in the art form at the time. As copycat “softies” quickly spread throughout the landscape, Phase 2 was forced to adapt and spin-off the ballooned letters into new micro styles with names as equally as brilliant as the forms themselves: Phasmagorical Phantastic, Bubble Clouds, Bubble Big Top, and Squish Lucious, to name a few.

The term “spam mail” originated on a message board in 1993, referring to a software bug that caused the mass-mailing of 200 messages to all of its users. The name derives from a Monty Python sketch in which a restaurant serves all of its food with lots of spam. In the skit a group of Vikings dining at the restaurant begin to repeatedly sing “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!” much to the annoyance of all other customers.

A spectrograph is a device used to visualize the frequency of a sonic spectrum. Primarily these devices are used to identify and analyze speech and animal sounds. Musicians such as Aphex Twin and Nine Inch Nails, however, have reverse engineered this process by developing a method to convert an image into a soundwave and embed it into a song. Perhaps the most famous of these instances is the Aphex Twin face hidden in the song [Equation].

A cinematic trope used to transition from one scene or part of a story to the next, the spinning newspaper alludes to the passing of time while simultaneously showing the major events that occurred via headlines. Spinning may occur against a black background, or via the overlaying of footage of a printing press, and is often prefaced by a stack of newspapers getting delivered or a newspaper boy yelling “Extra! Extra!”

A short line that bends or curves in an irregular way. According to Merriam Webster, squiggles are what result from scribbles, or hasty writing. To squiggle can also be a verb, as in to wiggle or squirm. 

The shapeshifting practice of embedding secret messages within openly accessible information systems. Steganography can take many forms, such as words hidden in pictures, coded textiles, messages embedded in buildings, invisible inks, and jargon code. Simply put, it is the art and science of hiding in plain sight. Steganography is often confused with cryptography, another form of secret writing that uses mathematical methods to scramble and encrypt messages. But whereas cryptography is a mathematical endeavor, steganography is steeped in alchemy, magic, and mystery, and as such has long flown under the radar. You might consider steganography “cryptography’s dark cousin.”

A stop error, more commonly known as the blue screen of death, occurs when a device has an unfixable error and must shut itself down. These screens are often associated with a color, for example when this error occurs on Xbox it will show a green screen and is referred to as the green screen of death. 

A writing system for Indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. Canadian syllabic scripts are not syllabaries, in which every consonant–vowel sequence has a separate glyph, but abugidas, in which consonants are modified in order to indicate an associated vowel. In Canadian syllabics, that indication is made through the orientation of the consonant; in Cree, for example, the consonant p has the shape of a chevron. In an upward orientation, ᐱ, it transcribes the syllable pi. Inverted, so that it points downwards, ᐯ, it transcribes pe. Pointing to the left, ᐸ, it is pa, and to the right, ᐳ, po. Canadian syllabics is said to have been invented in 1840 by missionary James Evans, but Cree oral accounts conflict with that record, claiming that syllabics originated before 1840 with a Cree named Calling Badger, whose near-death experience led to their creation.

Gloves proposed by Leslie Callard (c. 1917) as a communication system for deaf and blind people. 

A system of shorthand invented by Tiro, the slave and secretary of Cicero. Tiro is considered to be the father of stenography with many regarding his set of 4000 characters to be one of the first standardized Latin shorthand systems. The Tironian Notes were used for thousands of years before becoming associated with witchcraft and magic, and eventually disappearing. 

The graphic symbol for a missing glyph. Some Japanese people call this “tofubake” because rectangles look like tofu.

The tryzub has been a symbol of Ukraine as early as the 10th century. The fluidity of its form and meaning has invited speculation about its origins and interpretations, while allowing it to remain relevant whether inscribed in gold or tagged on a wall as a sign of resistance.
 

During the late 1800s, Plains Indians displayed and depicted the American flag upside-down as a clandestine form of protest against unjust U.S. policies. Since then, the inverted flag has been used to signal distress, immediate danger, or political dissent.

In book design a blank page, known as a Vacat Page, can serve a variety of purposes from taking up space, or balancing signatures, to separating content. In certain situations, often legal, or in examinations, a notice reading “This page intentionally left blank” is included to clarify that no mistake was made in the publication process.

A vanity plate is a custom license plate where the owner pays an extra fee to choose their set of characters, generally spelling out a word or abbreviation. The most expensive vanity plate in the world costs $24.3 million and is a California plate containing “MM.”

A tradition of the people indigenous to the Vanuatu archipelago in the South Pacific in which drawings are made in sand, volcanic ash, or clay. The draughtsperson uses one finger to trace a continuous meandering line on an imagined grid to produce geometric patterns. Around 80 different language groups inhabiting the central and northern islands of Vanuatu use the drawings as a means of communication, and also as a mnemonic devices to record and transmit rituals, mythological lore, and other information.

Wang Zhen 王禎 (1290–1333) was a Chinese mechanical engineer responsible for revolutionizing wooden moveable type printing. He improved upon earlier experimentation with wood by outlining methods of type production and inventing machines to streamline the process. One such machine, the revolving typecase, housed movable type arranged by rhyme scheme making individual characters easier to locate.

The Window Tax was a form of taxation in 18th and 19th century England, France, and Ireland, based on the number of windows on a house. As a result, many houses from the time covered their windows with bricks to avoid penalty.

The World Record Egg is the most liked post of any social media website. The 2015 stock photo of an egg was posted by the account @world_record_egg on January 4, 2019 and, as of March 2022, has over 55 million likes. 

After a study of more than 2,500 participants scientists have declared that the official worst time of day is 5am. Conversely, the study found that the best time of day is 5PM. Sleep tight!

Yerkish is an artificial language developed for use by non-human primates. It employs a keyboard whose keys contain lexigrams, symbols corresponding to objects or ideas. A lexigram represents a word but is not necessarily indicative of the object to which it refers.

Tandanori Yokoo is a Japanese artist, designer, and illustrator known for his signature style of psychedelic symbolism developed in the 60s. His work has appeared on several notable album covers including The Beatles, Miles Davis, and Haruomi Hosono of Yellow Magic Orchestra, and was prominently featured in MoMA’s 1968 exhibition “Word Image.” Writer Yuko Mishima described Yokoo’s work as, “explosions with the frightening resemblance which lies between the vulgarity of billboards advertising variety shows during festivals at the shrine devoted to the war dead and the red containers of Coca-Cola in American Pop Art, things which are in us but which we do not want to see.”

Yukio Ota is a Japanese professor and graphic designer responsible for creating the International Emergency Exit Symbol. In addition to this globally recognized design, Ota developed “LoCoS” or “Lovers’ Communication System,” a graphic language meant to allow users to communicate as intuitively and effortlessly as two lovers. Created in 1964, the symbols of LoCoS represent concepts rather than sounds, and can be combined in various ways to express more complex ideas.

The Z-340 cipher was a code sent by the Zodiac Killer in 1969 to the San Francisco Chronicle. The cryptogram went unsolved until 2020 when it was de-coded by a group of private citizens. The message, however, gave no further insight into the identity of the serial killer. Z-340 was the second cipher to have been sent by the Zodiac Killer. The first, sent earlier that year, was solved just days after it was published. 

Zalgo Text (named after an internet urban legend) is a form of text decoration comprised of various overlapping unicode symbols and marks that surround a central text, simulating a glitch. Zalgo text is prevalent in meme and message board culture and may be used maliciously to crash programs, such as Gmail or iMessage, that are unable to render the intricate forms.