Fast Five: Michela Graziani on Symbolikon
We love Michela Graziani’s Symbolikon project so much that we broke the rules. Buckle up — our usual Fast Five is a Less Fast (Though Equally Enjoyable) 12ish. We hope you’ll find it worth the extra time because you’re incredibly busy and important—but being able to communicate effectively is important, too.
AIGA Chicago focuses on designers and design-minded makers at the local level as well as in the larger global design community — be they students going down a creative path for the first time or luminaries with a ton of wisdom and experience under their belts. AIGA Chicago celebrates design in every possible way. We embrace the roles of designers because they bring greater meaning to the world, and we amplify their work with platforms like this one. If you’d like to join the conversation or submit an article for publication, please email cole@chicago.aiga.org.
Designers love iconography and symbolism. We love how they telegraph the very essence of something while also containing a sort of source code for all of history. They act as wayfinding through time and space, and they’re super-fun to create.
Rome-based designer Michela Graziani has long appreciated the meaning embedded within our designed world, particularly in the industrial and digital design space where she’s worked for the past 12 years. Symbols have the power to connect people, and in a post-fact world, symbols might be our only hope. We had the pleasure of sitting down for a Skype session with Michela about her Kickstarter for Symbolikon, a symbols library spanning ancient cultures through our modern age. To support her Kickstarter, click here.
AIGA Chicago: So I have to be honest. Reaching out to you was a little bit of a selfish act. Symbology and this idea of universal language are super-fascinating to me personally, but I know many designers and communicators dwell on these topics, which means AIGA is a great audience to have. I’m more than certain you have a few Kickstarter supporters among them. We’re just really thrilled to chat with you and excited to see where Symbolikon goes.
Michela Graziani: I really appreciate being asked to do an interview, because your preliminary questions really went deep into the meaning of the work. So you got it on a fundamental level, which means the symbols are already doing their jobs.
AIGA Chicago: I actually crowdsourced some of the initial questions, so you can kind of see what our members get excited about and what they’re inspired by. That said, I’m curious to know where you draw inspiration from, as a designer in general. Do any specific styles, designers or movements influence your process or your aesthetic?
Michela Graziani: I always try to get inspiration from something. Even my background is really wide. I started with product and industrial design, and I’ve often followed the approach from my schooling, which always starts with something that has cultural roots. So you can create, as in very old Italian style, something with deep meaning. For this reason, I try to find a relationship between good cultural references and modern graphic design. For a recent logo I did for a Nordic company, I started working with runes to tap into the ancient symbolism that has informed Scandinavian culture for centuries. From here, I can give a deeper meaning to these symbols by giving them new life in a new design.
I really avoid any design process that relies solely on aesthetics. The aesthetic part is important, but being aesthetically appealing is usually a given. What’s the greater story to the design? Symbolikon is an easy tool to transfer inspiration from one culture to another, to see all of them together, to understand that they are part of our present culture. Because every culture is the result of overlapping information — day by day, year by year, era by era.
AIGA Chicago: So where exactly did the initial idea for Symbolikon come from?
Michela Graziani: As a visual designer, I’m always faced with the challenge of making meaningful designs — whether logos, patterns or illustrations. And as a digital researcher, I always struggled to find a good digital resource for my research. I couldn’t find anything that acted as a repository for these important symbolic elements that continue to make up so much of our experienced world. So this is where the idea of a digital ethno-symbols library popped into my head, because I was a missing piece in visual communication, and I believed many other designers would like to at least have access to such a resource.
But my fascination with symbols goes way back. I always had an attraction for ancient myths and spirituality and their power within social groups. In almost all cultures, spirituality is combined with symbology and symbols to amplify the incredible communication power they have to flood emotions over-analytical reasoning.
AIGA Chicago: Someone like Karim Rashid comes to mind, thinking about your background in industrial and product design. He’s played around with new design language, inventing new symbols and new forms to evolve our experience with the world. How do you imagine Symbolikon growing into multiple dimensions or shifting the ways engage with objects and design in general?
Michela Graziani: During product development, when you think as an industrial designer, you always have to apply your idea to something that is currently in use — a real-world analog to prove out your concept. So there’s a degree of practicality about it. With Symbolikon, my idea is really to create something that can have a long life. So not just a library that you download and after one year is old and you have to replace with another one. I want to create something that is meaningful, giving the world more ways to align and reach a shared understanding. I’d like to create a Symbolikon award as well as a Symbolicon Academy, which would offer more information about symbology and cultures than just the library alone could offer. If I get too wrapped up in the extensions, I’ll lose track of what’s right in front of me. You can see why I might get excited.
AIGA Chicago: And it’s been great to see all the overwhelming support. Where would you say you got the most backing from? Designers, academics, historians, ethnographers? It makes sense that a broad range of people would be drawn to something like this.
Michela Graziani: The designer community has been super-positive and interested. The most surprising group who’s shown incredible interest is the developer community. There is a part of them that’s really in love with symbols. From there, I started to think maybe I haven’t considered the gaming aspect of symbol usage — they’re often filled with nods to ancient mysticism. And while it may be a stereotype, we’ve known developers to be gamers in their free time. They live inside of a magician’s world.
AIGA Chicago: Speaking of magical and distant lands, you mentioned before that you put a map up on your wall, using the pinpoints normally indicating places you’d actually traveled as your research areas of focus. What’s it feel like to hop from one place to the next — even if just metaphorically — discovering and uncovering new symbols for Symbolikon?
Michela Graziani: When I started this work, I really thought that I would wear my backpack and go around the world to see all of this. But then I took a moment to realize the logistics of that, so I just re-framed the idea more realistically and brought the journey into my mind.
I have a worldwide map in my studio and it acts as my journey plan. I would look at the map to decide a nation or an area to explore, launching into rough research about the major ancient populations. With this list of civilizations, the ethnographic research started, using digital libraries worldwide, foundations’ resources and books written by anthropologists and symbols specialists — always crossing sources to validate the right information.
At one point, I even thought to create a passport as a way of tying Symbolikon back to the act of learning and discovery.
AIGA Chicago: I love that. It could be part of the Academy, compelling people to not just dig into one culture or set of symbols, but to go and explore other ones. Another thing you described was your application of the golden ratio as a means to normalize the entire library of symbols and bring everything into a similar scale on a grid. Did you find that any of the symbols really were hard to translate?
Michela Graziani: Absolutely. A lot of symbols are really simple, with just basic, elementary linework. Even if the proportions are different, you can still save the meaning of the drawing. But, for example, Maori art is really complex because the drawings have an incredible amount of details. The most complex part is to take away details, without going too far so as to disassociate the symbol with its original intent — without losing its essence. And so I put great care into keeping them intact, which involved much deliberation and negotiation. I’m happy with the work we’ve done so far, and we’ve accounted for the difference in detail by including a couple of different strokes within the library.
AIGA Chicago: Were there any symbols whose meaning was tough to decipher, decode or categorize?
Michela Graziani: Yes. When I decided to explore symbolism related to the lost continent of Mu — also known as the hypothetical land of Lemuria, a legendary continent for modern scientists and geologists.
I was exploring ancient cosmogony, trying to go back to the first population with a complex system of symbols, so I faced this mythical idea that went back to Mayan and Egyptian populations. Mu lives in a limbo between reality and legend and is purported to be where evolved civilization came from. For this reason, I decided to insert these into Symbolikon collection, even if I really had difficulty defining a trustworthy system of symbols for an atypical category.
AIGA Chicago: What challenges did you run into when making these symbols consistent digitally? Did you develop any techniques or rules to make it easier?
Michela Graziani: The challenge was to create graphic guidelines that could be applied to both simple and complex systems of symbols with clear rules to follow even for new future categories still unexplored. First of all, as we discussed, I decided to use a grid based on the golden ratio and to redesign all of the symbols into a square framework. Then I defined the use of constant stroke thickness for the main shape and for details where necessary as well as the spacing between geometrical elements. Since the symbols are so different, I used combined elementary shapes and avoided free shapes in order to have a consistent collection.
AIGA Chicago: Have you noticed any symbols that are still used in contemporary culture today? Are there similarities between the symbols and today’s emoji, for instance?
Michela Graziani: Some tribes have survived to modernity and still use their symbology today. With Symbolikon, I explored symbology related to esoterism; currently, there are new religious movements reusing ancient magic symbology like Neopagans and Wiccans. Today, lots of these exotic symbols are largely used in tattoo designs while some of the symbology related to animal deities still keep the same meaning today. Ancient symbols with a large use of archetypal signs are mostly abstract, elementary, synthetic and possess a spiritual value.
Emoji today are iconic and descriptive, replacing our expressions in social media chats or helping the user navigate a website. They are the digital representation of human expressions or artifacts, and in this way, they behave differently than the symbols in Symbolikon. From my exploration, I can say that only Pre-Colombian civilizations in Mesoamerica used a human-like representation in their systems of symbols, which is more similar to our current emoji but still far away from our pop and human-centered culture.
AIGA Chicago: Are you concerned about the meanings of the symbols being disregarded, appropriated, or exploited?
Michela Graziani: I am. Because the sense of each symbol is not merely its graphic shape but also it’s meaning, I decided to go beyond my visual abilities and strongly felt the need to match a description for every category and each symbol. In this way, the user can follow a pattern and pay attention to every symbol.
AIGA Chicago: So as far as resources go, are there opportunities for people who are interested in learning more about the symbols to connect with academic authorities, additional research or source material?
Michela Graziani: Totally. I even like to write my references into the website so it’ll be easier to follow a paper trail to other resources. I’ve also been playing around with some early activations of the symbols, just to get people interested and excited. I don’t know if it’s the symbols or if because I’ve never created animated GIFs, but I found so much pleasure doing them, and they’ve already had more than 1.5 million views. It makes me hope that many unexpected and wonderful things will happen.
AIGA Chicago: It’s already sounding like Symbolikon is a living, breathing thing, connecting people through shared resources and excitement for the past and the future. I feel like you’re going to have a lot of conversations going, because people will reach out and say, ‘Oh, have you thought about, or have you seen this?’ So it seems like this is going to grow and grow, and you might have to get a personal assistant. Going back to the idea of connection, do you think there’s an opportunity for designers today to create new symbols (or leverage old ones) to represent universal concepts with the goal of unifying our global society?
Michela Graziani: Global society has the intrinsic problem of simplifying and unifying the distinctive features of each individual culture. This project, instead, wants to treasure all the individual differences of ancient cultures with a graphic language that makes them interesting for modern applications. I believe today’s designers can and must create new symbols to communicate visually new systems and new actions going beyond language boundaries.
AIGA Chicago: No small task, but we think designers are up to the challenge. And now, with Symbolikon, they’ll have an excellent tool and resource to feed their creativity and innovation. So, thank you for that and for your time today.
Michela Graziani: My pleasure! Anytime I can step outside of a project I’m working on and view it in a new context is a gift. Thank you for believing in Symbolikon and for sharing my passion in regards to its power and meaning.
