Monday 4 January 2016

5/5

The ever-intriguing Kottke shares an interesting look on how emoji data labels can be effective, subjective tools for prompting the formation of better sleep-hygiene. Immediate instructions such as the routine presented in the interview at the link can be habit-forming, it seems, and is reflective of the presence this iconography has as a complement to language.
Ages ago, I developed my own system of short-hand and employed this vocabulary (which struck me as a quite memorable hieroglyphics) for note-taking and felt my retention was better for it and still think in those symbols from time to time. Beyond personal rankings and pet-use, there’s also apparently a trend in critics’ circles that gravitating away from “stars” towards more expressive pictorial scale. We’ll see how long this approaches lasts and hopefully it will have run its course before a Rosetta Stone is needed to decipher what two moai and one Great Wave off Kanagawa means for a restaurant. What do you think? Do you defer to the experts in the first place? Maybe simpler is better.