Nobody asked for these. I’m sure they’re useful somehow — time will tell.

I made an icon for garlic anyway. And for a cockroach, and for a bottle of holy water (I really am NOT religious). I also snatched emojis, stock images and shit I didn’t really create.

It can be seen as intellectual theft, or graphic sampling, or iconographic readymade art. Twenty per plate. Numbered, named, done.

They come from whatever passes through my eyes during the day. Emoji. Screenshots. Some weird post. A bone. An AK-47 (both are on flags btw). A paperclip, whatever shit was on the table.

I don’t go looking for subjects — the subjects are already there, sitting somewhere in a mess. Every so often one of them floats up and I add it before it sinks back down.

Then I strip it. Black, white, vectorize it, pixelize it, vectorize it again. Sometimes a quick smooth, but nothing else. No grey, no unneeded detail, a bit like a glyph.

It’s a brutal test and most images fail it: you get a smudge, or some unrecognizable mess. But sometimes the thing holds.

The horse is still a horse if the shape holds.

None of this is original and I’m not pretending it is. It’s a way of getting something positive out of the doomscrolling — now I can pretend it’s some kind of curating.

Glaser drew a heart, put it between two letters, and it gave I❤NY: one glyph doing the job of a sentence. Aicher made a stick man for Munich and now every airport on earth speaks his language.

Toilet doors. Fire exits. The pictogram for don’t put your hand in the big hydraulic machine. That stuff is the highest form of the discipline and nobody signs it.

So yeah, most of the first ones are emojis. I steal, sample, collect, curate what I see first. But in some way it’s important to start with the obvious ones.

Not yet, and that’s the honest answer.

None of these were made for a project and only a few of them have landed in one. In a way it’s like a font: independent of the project, but it can be an ultra important part of a lot of projects if done right.

That’s where this is going. A style, a world, a way of saying things that looks like me and not like a Google icon set.

It doesn’t exist yet.