45 Symbols – Clay to Code

45 Symbols – Clay to Code explores how designers might translate research findings, personal experiences and complex ideas into a concise visual identity. It’s a task inspired by one of the most enigmatic objects in media history, the 3,700-year-old, as yet undeciphered Phaistos Disc, a disc of fired clay embossed with 45 distinct symbols that encourages practitioners and design students alike to develop systematic approaches to visual language. 

Ranging from personal narratives to global issues, the featured works in 45 Symbols – Clay to Code demonstrate how an original visual grammar can be constructed.

Over more than a decade, the internationally-hosted design seminar series ‘The Phaistos Project – Forty-five Symbols’ has evolved into a global community driven by open calls, workshops, exhibitions and risograph publications. 45 Symbols – Clay to Code, the book, brings together over 2,000 symbols resulting from these collaborations. It stands not only as a living archive of research inquiries but also as a testament to collective experimentation, bold visions and the expression of intercultural dialogue.

Contributions to the book are organised into five thematic fields:

1.Traces of everyday life, material culture and the domestic archive
2. Planetary surfaces, landscape as archive, and the ecological memory of the Anthropocene
3. Politics of language, symbols of protest and collective transformation
4. Cultural scripts, spiritual codes and visual identity
5. Speculative alphabets, linguistic flux and future archives

This book aims to both inspire and provide hands-on methods for developing skills in visual storytelling, documentation and reflection practice that foster authentic, systematic and distinctive personal outcomes.

Slanted, 320pp, 21cm x 28cm, illustrated paperback, 2026