Cthulhu Who?

Cthulhu. You've probably seen the imagery before and then again, and not known exactly what
the significance was. 

Seriously, this character has shown up in art, posters, plush dolls, tee shirts, and more.
Cthulhu has been the subject of fan fiction, role-playing games, and costumes. His (Her?)
popularity has gained recently, but did you know that is fictional character has been around for... 


84 years?


You can thank H.P. Lovecraft for masterminding this character in 1926, first appearing in a
short story titled "Call of Cthulhu". Described as appearing as a cross between a human, a dragon,
and an octopus, Cthulhu is said to drive away a person's sanity merely glimpsing his form.

Sanity: Defeated

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get. It was a term that described something that was alien at the time it was conceived. What you saw on the screen was very much similar to what you got when you produced. It was how they described the first GUI, or Graphical User Interface. The first consumer GUI was released in 1981. The GUI allowed the user to see pictures, rather than just text, and was a major leap forward. 

Although it may not seem so today.

Magic has come a long way.

When I first started playing Magic: The Gathering, a collectible card game, I was in 8th grade. Not to date myself here, but the game came out in 1993. I started playing about a year after it was released. I played for maybe a few years before shelving my collection. During the time that I played, the design of the cards changed very little. For example, when I began, they looked like this:

Many sets later, they looked like this:

The art got a little better, but the design format remained largely the same. It has been only recently that I picked the game back up again, leaving an 8 year gap unexplored. So how much has changed? Not a lot. The game still plays the same. The words are largely still in the same spot, but the cards have changed a little... oh, and the art has gotten a lot better:

Culture Jamming

According to urbandictionary.com "Culture jamming, is the act of using existing media such as billboards, bus-ads, posters, and other ads to comment on those very media themselves or on society in general, using the original medium's communication method. It is based on the idea that advertising is little more than propaganda for established interests, and that there is little escape from this propaganda in industrialized nations. Culture jamming differs from artistic appropriation (which is done for art's sake), and from vandalism where destruction or defacement is the primary goal." Let's take a moment to think where we have seen this recently.

Coat of Arms

The Coat of Arms is something that many of us would describe as historic. It was developed originally in the mid-12th century as armorial bearing of feudal lord and knights as a method to determine ally from enemy.

There was no universal rules governing them, but they managed to stay consistent throughout Europe in the middle ages. 

I'm going to blame peer-pressure.

Historic or not, however, this practice is far from dead.

Ideograms. We've gotten better at them.

So we understand an ideogram as a character or symbol that represents a complete idea. We, as humans, have been using them for thousands of years. Sometimes, in history, a combination of many ideograms are required to tell a story. Sometimes, it's just not very easy to interpret just what the ancient peoples of this earth had to say.

we think it's agricultural...

But we've had lots of practice. Many years of refining our technique has given us the ability to apply one basic symbol combination and provide us complex ideas and/or instructions.

Smoke in front of this sign and take a cell phone picture to become cool.

Do not wrestle with; your kung-fu is not yet strong.

Then again, maybe is hasn't...

Logo or Logotype? Get your terminology correct.

          Logotype refers to a symbol built 


entirely or near-entirely from typography.


Examples include Google, Yahoo!, and


Coca-cola:

       Logo refers, more or less, to symbols. They are nearly an interchangable 


term. It may include type, but is largely a symbol, or a symbol combined with 


typography. Examples include Pepsi, Logitech, and Starbucks:

Art Nouveau still lives.

Art Nouveau was an art movement that did not stay within a specific medium. As an applied art, it transcended into architecture, and decorative arts. Characterized by flowing curves and stylied movements. It peaked for nearly 15 years.

Theophile Alexandre Steinlen (French, 1859-1923) Chat Noir (French for black cat), one of the best recognized Art Nouveau works, was actually a poster to advertise a 19^th century cabaret.

Modern artists also use the Art Nouveau style. Daniel hosts a website showing his work at artofdaniel.com as an illustrator and professional artist. The majority of his illustrations are figurative or abstract.

Ancient scripts with modern applications.

     “They make great armband tattoos” are the words of Jeremy Hall when describing the use of Sanskrit in modern day tattooing. “Sanskrit words or scripts look very organized because of the horizontal line joining each character” he states when describing the utility of the language.

     Sanskrit, an ancient language dating as early as 1500BC, was used for Hindu and other religions. It was also used for poetry, technical, and philosophical writings. Sometimes called the “mother of all languages”, today it is used in Hindu ceremony.

     Sanskrit tattoos are recently gaining in popularity and designs with their meanings and designs hosted on many websites. Often in a band around the wrist or arm, sometimes they are depicted scrolling down the wrist or incorporated into elaborate traditional designs.

     If an ancient script is still being tattooed to people’s skin, can we still call it a ‘dead’ language? 

Primitive to Primitivism

    Primitive cave renderings of our ancient ancestors adorned the rock floors, walls, and ceilings of ancient homes long ago. This first

system of art, dubbed so because of the unity shared among them, was called the "Magdalenian art system"; the first in human history, 40,000-10,000BC. Qualities of later systems of art, such as composition, proportion, and refined color, simply were not developed to apply.

      Beginning in the 1700's a new 'system' came into being, in some ways reminiscent of the Magdalenian. The term Naive art applies to art created by those outsiders from the art community of the times, whom had not the luxury of practiced study and quality education of the artists at the time. Their work was characterized by the apparent 'abandonment' of fundamental

artistic qualities. The reality was that the lack of fundamental study gave rise to breakthroughs not available to the 'stuck in the box' artists. In fact, this style has been labeled 'primitivism' because of its resemblance to primitive art.