Nigel Holmes

“Introduction to symbol culture”

John Lennon (who would have turned 84 on October 9th this year) said, of his contentious relationship with Paul McCartney, ‘talking is the slowest form of communication. Music is much better.’ He knew that his medium gave him a way to get through to people. In our business, we’d substitute symbols for music.

Pictorial messages have been around a lot longer than speech—didn’t human communication start with gestures and drawings on cave walls? 60,000 years later, we are still refining (and defining) pictorial language. We continue the effort to make clear exactly what we mean by our tiny black and white signs.

Could those signs ever be truly universal? And do we want that? Different cultures have different ideas about pictorial meanings. Have translation apps that allow us to speak and read in any language pushed away the need for any symbols? No! Let’s invoke Lennon’s dictum and take up the challenge…pictorially!

We are living in a symbol society.

Biography
Born in England in 1942, Nigel Holmes went to the Royal College of Art and worked as a freelance information graphics designer in London for 10 years before moving to the US in 1978 to work at Time Magazine, where he became Graphics Director. After 16 years at Time, he left to start his own information design business, Explanation Graphics. Clients have included Apple, Sony, American Express, Visa, GM, Nike, and such publications as National Geographic, The New York Times, Fortune, and The New Yorker. In 2009, the Society for News Design gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2021 he was awarded the Ladislav Sutnar Award. He has written 11 books about graphics, including Crazy Competitions (2018), The Bigger Book of Everything (2020), and Joyful Infographic (2023). Website: www.nigelholmes.com