Monday 14 March 2011

iFruit

Danny 大霓 and Elaine 爱兰 Round have adopted the name iFruit for their Loughborough 拉夫堡 Market Fruit and Veg stall. I have produced a poster for them that reflects their name. There is much more to the poster than first meets the eye. But first a visual of my poster:-


A second version of the poster with business contact details.

The name transforms in steps from the English iFruit to the Chinese 爱水果. The Chinese character 爱, in this context, means Loves or Likes. 爱 is pronounced the same as the English letter i. Thus 爱Fruit is pronounced the same as iFruit. 水果 is the Chinese for Fruit. The three forms of the name now take on the meanings Love Fruit or Like Fruit.

The Emoticons and the Fruits on the poster are characters in new Unicode blocks introduced in Unicode version 6.0.0. The Unicode blocks they belong to are:

  • Miscellaneous Symbols & Pictographs U+1F300⇒1F5FF
  • Emoticons U+1F600⇒1F64F

The specific characters I used are:

  • U+1F347 GRAPES
  • U+1F349 WATERMELON
  • U+1F352 CHERRIES
  • U+1F353 STRAWBERRY
  • U+1F603 SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH
  • U+1F604 SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES
  • U+1F60B FACE SAVOURING DELICIOUS FOOD
  • U+1F60C RELIEVED FACE

If you want to use characters in these new Unicode blocks then you will need a font with the glyphs. I highly recommend the excellent and free Symbola font.

I produced these posters on a Mac using Pages which is one of the Apps in Apple's 爱Work bundle.