wildcat2030:

Try to explain any philosophical “ism” to your friend or colleague. Unless you’re both scholars, you probably can’t do so easily. London-based graphic designer Genís Carreras wants to make it easier for us to talk philosophy, so he’s removing words all together and replacing them with pictures in his postcard and book project Philographics.

Carreras takes larger-than-life ideas and visualizes them, reducing the coursework of collegiate studies into basic colors and shapes. What’s left are minimal yet clever illustrations, like two overlapping circles (dualism), two different colored heart shapes on a yellow background (existentialism), and layered blue circles with a white dot in the middle (deductionism), that help your brain fill in the rest of the concept after reading the short description.

Philographics started out with 26 posters and has since grown to 95 designs and a highly funded Kickstarter campaign that still has two weeks until its end. His first illustration was for determinism, done when he had the idea to show the theory using cascading dominoes. That sparked the idea to make the project into a journal to explain philosophy to a younger, more visually literate audience. While Carreras is a philosophy buff, he realizes many people now see the theories as archaic ideas only uttered in lecture halls.

“I wanted to make philosophy look better, to feel more contemporary and relevant,” Carreras says. “For me shapes and colors are a way to communicate, a way that can break through language and age barriers. As a graphic designer, this is the only way I knew.” (via Explaining Complicated Philosophies With Gorgeously Simple Postcards | Wired Design | Wired.com)