linguistics sticker

I designed this sticker for the University of Michigan's Linguistics department.

The study of language as a phenomenon is abstract, and rarely represented visually. Linguists often use the "wug" image (a birdlike squiggle originating in a famous study of child language acquisition). It's gotten a lot of traction, and in that way it is good branding, but it doesn't really represent the whole field. My design aims at that broader representation.

I represent the connective function of language with the human silhouettes, and the versatility of language with a focus on gesture, not prioritizing spoken over signed language.

The symbols in the background represent a few linguistic subfields: syntax, computational linguistics, phonetics, and psycholinguistics.