700+ pictograms, 60 free fonts, 30 vector packs

From maltaannon and others on Twitter:

• Pictodeck v1.0 is a deck of pictograms for Apple Keynote. It’s a collection of over 700 vector pictograms taken from four different sets: PICOL, Android Icons, Pictoico, Komodo Media, and Freshpixel.
• 50 awesome free fonts for professional design from Design Reviver
• 10 Awesome Free Handwritten Fonts from MyInkBlog
• 61 Fantabulous Fonts For Titles! from AE Tuts
  
• 30 First-Rate Vector Packs. Take Them. They’re FREE…. from Francesco Mugnai

For more, see the "Popular" posts of Smashing Magazine, which has made a cottage industry of these sorts of collections. One example is The Ultimate Collection Of Free Vector Packs.

Heller’s animated appraisal of Olympic pictograms

Via Motionographer is Steven Heller’s Olympic Icons: an Animated Appraisal at The New York Times website:

See also The Graphic Design Olympics (2004) by Michael Bierut at Design Observer, and another short comparison of various Olympic icons. Interesting recent work includes pictograms developed for the 2008 Summer Olympics in China by a former Adobe guy; see The Graphic Language of Min Wang.

The use of pictograms in history and in modern design is an established field of study, with major works by Henry Dreyfuss (Symbol Sourcebook), Otl Aicher, Otto Neurath, Paul Rand, Edward Tufte, and others.

A few sentences on the subject can only be inadequate. For more info, see Navigating Today’s Signs: An Interview with Mies Hora by Steven Heller and Critical Wayfinding by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller. "Modern Hieroglyphs" in Design, Writing, & Research by Lupton and Miller (excerpt pdf) makes a really cool use of pictograms in explaining pictograms in design and history.

Update: Slate has 6-part series on The Secret Language of Signs, which includes why signs are better now than they've ever been, why the signs in Penn Station are so confusing, how smarter signs could make London easier to navigate, and the international war over the exit sign.

See also How and When to Use Pictograms from Pixel Resort.

History of the internet in pictograms

The History of the internet is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file-sharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told with help of the PICOL icons, which are also a part of a student project by Melih Bilgil. Some icons are available for free on picol.org. (via Motiongrapher)


History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

The use of pictograms in history and in modern design is an established field of study, with major works by Henry Dreyfuss (Symbol Sourcebook), Otl Aicher, Otto Neurath, Paul Rand, Edward Tufte, and others.

A few sentences on the subject can only be inadequate. For more info, see Navigating Today’s Signs: An Interview with Mies Hora by Steven Heller and Critical Wayfinding by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller. Really cool uses of pictograms in explaining pictograms in design and history can be found in Design, Writing, & Research by Lupton and Miller (PDF).

Interesting recent work includes pictograms developed for the Summer Olympics in China by a former Adobe guy; see The Graphic Language of Min Wang (via).