black and white – strong lines
describe our world: content kings
now in front of us
Bet you never knew there was such a thing as barcode haikus, did you? Some people take them one step further and encode their haikus into barcodes. The haiku above would look like this:
For those of you who don’t know what a haiku is… it is a very short type of Japanese poetry consisting of three lines broken into 17 morae or syllables – 5 in the first line, 7 in the second and 5 again in the third. The design concept is to create a juxtaposition of two images or ideas with a cutting concept between them.
In the haiku above the simple black and white lines are compared to kings based on the value of their content. Put it on a label and you might have a new form of “guerilla poetry” – that is to say, poetry that is circulated in unexpected and unusual ways in unpredictable and unconventional places.
For more information on haikus and barcodes, you might see:
• Memorial Haikus for N. Joseph Woodland, Co-Inventor of the Barcode. (Be sure to also read the NY Times piece about him… it’s rather interesting.))
