I have a bit of a affair with pictograms – the small black and white symbols that represent commonly understood concepts.

Once you start to out for them you see them everywhere, from stations to , on products, and even in fashion.

Recently, Emoji have become popular (partly through being better-supported on ). They’re a sort-of pictogram, but in colour, cutesy, and generally appallingly designed.

The beauty of a true pictogram is its ability to convey a message using the simplest of forms, with enough detail to be recognisable, but no more.

In some ways they behave like nouns in language, which point at conceptual meanings within our minds. But whereas words are essentially arbitrary , pictograms actually look like the thing they depict, so they’re perhaps more like onomatopoeias, requiring less decoding and thus communicating at a deeper, more instinctive level.

One of my favourite places to spot pictograms in in zoos. The classic animals that everyone knows and loves are easy – things like , and , the cave and the house. I’ve not yet seen a pictogram for a Komodo dragon or a red panda, but it can surely only be a matter of time…

Maps are another great place to discover pictograms. I love studying the key on OS maps, and then trying to spot some of the obscure symbols - things like and , preserved and .

The BBC weather forecasts have reduced their use of pictograms, in favour of more accurate and detailed 3D satellite renderings, but you do still see the occasional and cloud symbols – shapes which have been etched in our minds since as the signifier of excitement.

I have, on occasion, tried to a few pictograms of my own. It’s tougher than it looks, and I’m no artist. Obeying a few ‘rules’, such as minimum stroke widths and standard radiuses and angles, does help, but the hardest thing is getting it to look just exactly right, which can only be done by eye and by experimentation.

If I finish any that I'm really proud of I’ll share them.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy the experience of discovering them.

I've been looking through a book of scribbled notes that I've kept over the past couple of years and one of the phrases that jumped out at me was 'Heirloom Electronics'. I can't remember where this came from (I suspect some conference or another), but the idea is powerful.

Most electronic products I can think of seem to either have a clear path to obsolescence (eg cassette players) or else eventually stop working (with repairs being either impossible or simply more than the cost of replacement).

However, will this always be the case? Might we have reached a point where it's possible to develop products that are powerful enough such that future improvements are non-essential, robust enough to survive a generation, and loved enough to hold an emotional attachment.

I had a think about whether any of my parents' electronic products might become significant heirlooms. The only things I can think of are a record player and a coffee grinder.

Amongst my own stuff, I'm hoping to one day be able to hand down a motorised Lego train set and a huge wall clock. There's room for a few more things in this collection though.

Wow, the upcoming Lego movie plot is all about freestyle play and not just building the model you get instructions for. Pretty brave, and what a fantastic message.

It is the story of basically a young man who doesn't have a creative bone in his body and has to always build things from the instructions.

From Lego Movie Writer/Directors Explain 'Crazy' Premise For The Film, MTV Movies Blog.

I’ve long been fascinated by the consumer model of subscribing to regular deliveries of things in the post. The obvious application of this has traditionally been magazines, and I used to love receiving Time Out weekly whilst living in London (and long ago Focus Magazine).

There’s also the lucrative market in ‘part work’ magazines. You see these advertised on TV just after Christmas, offering you the chance of building a scale model of the Titanic in easy steps, with Issue 1 being just 99p (and the price rising sharply soon after). Consequently I have a growing collection of first issues of these.

We’re starting to see this model spreading beyond printed media though. Lost Crates offers subscriptions to quarterly deliveries “Design-inspired goods”. Man Packs does subscription underwear (for men who hate shopping). Lego has its Master Builders Academy, giving kids the opportunity to receive regular Lego, as well as teaching them advanced building techniques. It works for food too, Graze sends out healthy snack food, and of course there are numerous veg box and wine club schemes.

Meanwhile Quarterly Co. introduces the concept of product curators. You subscribe to someone whose taste or ideas interest you, and only get a vague description of what to expect.

All this is marvellous, and I’d like to see more of it.

If physical products are struggling to compete with digital (DVDs, books, magazines, games, you name it), then perhaps adopting one of the key design patterns of social websites – the stream – will help.

Note: one issue all of these services have to face is what Russell Davies called the last two inches problem. But with some creative packaging, it’s amazing how much stuff can be made to fit through a letterbox.

I've been slowly working my way through cooking the recipes in Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty cookbook. The focus is on vegetables, and all the recipes are entirely vegetarian (even though Ottolenghi himself isn’t).

What makes it fun though is that all of the recipes employ some combination of unusual ingredients, technique or cooking method. This means that, unlike most recipes, you actually have to follow the recipes pretty closely, and actually have all of the ingredients listed (I’ve made a few substitutions on occasions, but only when feeling confident).

I cooked the “Roasted butternut squash with sweet spices, lime and green chilli” recipe (page 65) recently, for example, and whilst it sounded straightforward at first glance, it took me almost ten minutes just to precisely cut the limes. I then had to shell a couple of tablespoons of green cardamom and grind the seeds into a power — something I'd never have thought to do, usually I just chuck whole cardamom pods into curry or rice.

The dish is also served with a yoghurt and tahini sauce. That's something I had done before (those two ingredients are match made in heaven), although this time with added lime juice.

The final presentation is made up of piles of the roasted spiced butternut squash, dollops of the yoghurt, the sliced lime (which has been soaked in oil and salt), fresh chilli and coriander leaves.

The plate is both beautiful to look at, with vibrant oranges and greens, and a joy to eat. The sweetness of the spices complements the sharpness of the lime, bound together with the creaminess of the yoghurt.

And this is just one of the 100+ recipes in the book (all usefully organised by main vegetable ingredient). I have many more to try.

If you enjoy cooking (and eating), I really recommend the book. I eat meat, but I think Ottolenghi may be the best argument yet that sometimes – often even – vegetables are plenty.

FAO Schwarz, the huge New York toy shop, turns 150 years old this year. I've not been, but as I'm going to New York in a couple of weeks, I'm looking forward to a first visit.

The store was originally set up by Frederick August Otto Schwarz, and the FAO Schwarz website has a great quote by him on their history page:

I have made toys my life study. It is a splendid issue, and aside from the commercial question, there is more solid satisfaction in dealing with childhood playthings, and in knowing the joy one is sending out into the hearts of the little ones, than in selling any other commodity in the world.

That's enough to make anyone want to join the toy business.

Sadly, FAO Schwarz was bought out by Toys R Us a few years ago, and the New York flagship store is now the only one left.

The Tegu Story:

It all started with an innocent, curiosity-driven question: “Could we create a for-profit company based in Honduras that would foster a positive social impact through its business?”

Quite an unusual start for a toy company. The result is a set of products that combine sustainably-harvested hardwood and tiny powerful magnets to make building blocks that can defy gravity.

They've even invented magnetic wheels, so that you can create vehicles. I've no idea how well these roll, but it's a fun little gimmick.

Tegu blocks are fairly widely available, and the prices, though a little more expensive than comparable non-magnetic building blocks, do include a sizeable contribution to the Honduras communities.

Some websites now contain 'responsive images'. These scale (or crop) depending upon your screen's viewing area, so the image sizes remain appropriate whether you're looking at the website on a mobile phone, or on a huge flat screen monitor.

This is an example of responsive text.

The amount of textual detail scales relative to your screen size.

The effect is achieved using simple HTML class names and CSS media queries which show or hide the content depending upon the current screen width.

It's a bit of an experiment, and I'm not really sure how useful it really is, but I think it's an interesting idea.

It could also perhaps be combined with some form of a user interface that allows you to control how much text you want to read. This might be really useful for news articles, for instance – you could decide whether to read full quotes and a detailed backstory, or just the gist.

I'm not sure if anyone has really noticed much, but when I last updated this website, I also decided to pick a new website icon (also called a “favicon”).

I'm rubbish at drawing though, and so to make things easy I thought I'd just pick a pre-existing but relatively unknown symbol. The one I settled on was the Pilcrow.

I've always known this as the 'Invisibles' icon from Microsoft Word, but Pilcrow is its official name (also “paragraph mark“).

It has a rich typographical history, apparently, originating from the letter C (for the Latin capitulum, meaning “chapter”), before evolving into the mirrored double-stroke P character. Then finally it became obsoleted by the convention of physically separating paragraphs with whitespace instead.

The idea I like most though is that the Pilcrow represents “a new train of thought”.

Given that my train of thought is being constantly being diverted, derailed, and replaced by a bus service, I thought it'd make an appropriate icon.

Three design principles from Lego CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp:

When it’s advertised does it make a child say: ‘I want this!’?

Once he opens the box, does it make him go: ‘I want more of this’?

One month later, does he come back to the toy and still play with it? Or does he put it on the shelf and forget about it?

I believe the last point is the most important. Although it should say six months, not one.

(From Brickipedia: the story of Lego, Saga Magazine).