TSTO

Why do we feel obliged to end some sentences with two dots and a parenthesis? Does the use of such symbols enrich our communication or do they impoverish our language and slowly turn us into illiterate idiots like in the Mike Judge movie “Idiocracy”?

The history of typography has come full circle, from cave paintings to the abstraction into individual letters, and back to using pictures of things to express emotions like joy or desire.

The “happy face” is happiness commoditized. It is there to tell us we should (or must!) be happy about our life. In this publication, we wanted to explore both the nostalgic and the visionary dimensions of a visual language that is becoming more and more twisted up in self-references and meta-discussion.

To expand the vocabulary of expressible emotions, we asked a wide range of friends, artists, designers, musicians and writers to contemplate about smileys and produce a smiley of their own.