Headlines as Pictograms

I found this really interesting project on www.iconglobe.net. The idea for this being that a simple application would take headlines from the BBC News and then split each word up in the headline, creating a picture from that word. I think that the design of the pictograms is a clever idea of transforming a news headline into picture form, in order to communicate in all languages where available.

I think that this would prove to be quite difficult however, as I am sure that not all words are as easy to draw as others. I think that the text is needed to run underneath the images because without this I probably would not have realised what the actual headline was. I could definitely get beer but for the traffic light picture I did not realise that this meant ‘stay’ without reading the text. Now that I know that it means ‘stay’ though, I understand what the picture is attempting to communicate because of the way that the top light, which is red on a traffic light is highlighted in white. And the red light means stop when you are driving, hence the word ‘stay’.

I also think that the consistency in the design for these pictograms is key to the reading of the headline because it is supposed to link, as it is a sentence. This has been achieved because you can see the stroke of the white lines that make up the pictogram are highlighted and it appears are of the same weight. There is also an even distribution between the curved lines and straight lines to show shape in the pictograms. I think the curved lines bring more realism to certain pictograms such as the plunger because this is what it is like in reality rather than perfectly straight. Particularly the way that they have not added any extra colour, simply sticking to black background with white line makes it look a lot more professional and clear to the audience, which I am sure is how the BBC would want to be seen.