I was going to move my work on symbolism into signs this week by placing symbols in context but I got side tracked by colour and shape again and wanted to generate a very pure simple statement about symbolism and disability and have tried to achieve that here.
I have applied symbols using various colour combinations here and that means some stand out more than others. You will also notice I have placed one different active disability symbol facing opposite as an evocation of difference within the wheelchair using community.
The above image works quite well but could be better: firstly the last black symbol needs to be reversed in terms of colouring so freedom is emphasised by the omission of the black surround (ie so the symbols isn’t bounded). This means that I should omit the line of traditional symbols in white boxes in order to improve the emphasis. See what I mean below.
This works well because now all the traditional symbols are bounded and the new symbol isn’t, and the way they face each other puts them on conflict. But then I thought about evoking escape and came up with the image below.
I really like this as it can be read in many ways but clearly the dynamic image is breaking away from the group. That would look quite good on a page but I wanted to see what it would look like without bleeding into the white page.
Thoughts
These sets really achieve something. They are simple and yet complex and powerful. I did experiment with varying the colours like this below, but prefer the simplicity afforded by the use of primary colours as they suit the approach.
anomiepete 