to rent a video
and you make a list of adjectives
describing the ideal video
you're in the mood for
now collect thousands of such lists
from a broad sample of renters
and compile a master list
with the most popular adjectives first
the design challenge
with heraldic barcodes
is to associate each of these
most popular adjectives
with a distinctive graphic element
carefully chosen
so that all the adjective/elements
describing any given movie
can be composed into an icon
that permits quick visual scanning
(eg on a shelf of box-spines)
as with my flickr proposal
the most convenient grouping
must be foreground-background-frame
backgrounds could again be colored stripes
representing genres
so a little element of horror
might be a thin red stripe
while a lot of nudity
a wide pink stripe
mild horror or mild nudity
might use less saturated colors
(or is pink already
unsaturated red?)
clever choice of color-variants
and stripe arrangement
might map more complex
genre-mixes
the frame
(maybe 4 pixels wide
around the whole icon)
should tell how long it is
how expensive/cheap it looks
how smart/dumb
how highly rated
the official rating
might be shown as a letter
located on a stripe
that indicates why it got that rating
(sex, nudity, language, violence)
perhaps the foreground
could be an 'auteur icon'
representing (eg)
a director (eg Tarantino)
a star (Jackie Chan)
a writer (Charlie Kaufman)
a franchise (James Bond)
shorter videos on (eg) youtube
need some custom modifications
to this scheme
frames: length, production values
background-genres:
pratfall, dancing
lipsynch, vlog, etc
and novels
and short stories
need something like this
too
