Casually Hardcore devlog

The Language of our Times

October 4th, 2008

Nick Pugh in “Originality in Design” talks about creating an unique visual language, an iconography for your work. We copy and borrow from modern pop culture all the time, so it’s often difficult to create something truly “original” or “unique” - especially within a known genre.

Nick himself, fights with creating original car designs - an area with very specific constraints.

How he approaches it is to free draw “garbage” for an hour or so. Writers will perform a similar task by free-writing for a dozen or so pages before attempting something specific. It loosens up the mind to be creative and effectively kills the inner critic.

There is a theory that creating anything original is impossible, because all the ideas have been thought of. Originality is not the goal in my opinion.

It’s all about creating an “iconography” which, to me, means something distinctive enough that others will copy it in the future.

Often you’ll see the borrowing of iconography in advertising because they need to make an impact quickest - thus must “borrow” their style.

Warhol has been cloned in ads (and he borrowed plenty himself).

(Pepe Jeans)

(Levi Jeans)

Back in the mid-90s, his b&w montage photos were also borrowed by Guess Jeans and were the first things you saw when you opened a copy of Rolling Stones (the magazine).

A cliche had to originate from somewhere (mostly that William guy!)… it wasn’t a cliche to start with, but became one from overuse.

Modern/recent iconography:

Geometry Wars. It modernized the neon-geometric iconography of the early 80s.

Apple ads (many of these have become iconic):

Toy Story - Introduced the mainstream to plastic computer graphics rendering.

The Matrix - Bullet time and green symbol art.

The Matrix borrowed plenty of iconography itself: leather-bound fetish wear, Snowcrash and other cyberpunk novels…. but yet it was considered somewhat original. All because of bullet time + techno-art and how that film integrated those elements.

Without a distinctive language, your game / novel / piece of art will get lost in the noise. The iconography acts as your best ad.

Entry Filed under: Game Development