What do McDonald's, Parker Brothers, Nike, and MGM all have in common? Don't think too hard. Just by reading the names, you can conceptualize the answer. Odds are that you visualized golden arches, the Monopoly man, a swoosh, and a lion — all of which represent only a fraction of the symbols and logos that people recognize regardless of their country of origin or primary language.

The best designs, and often the most simple, are etched in our memories. Some we look for daily, as destination points or landmarks on the way to and from wherever we're going. "Turn left at the golden arches, make a right at the Shell station, and look for the Red Lobster sign straight ahead." We've all received and given such directions, taking for granted the familiarity of visual symbols. Our heads are full of them. But have we any idea why certain logos work so well and how they were conceived in the first place?

Graphic designer and educator Maggie Macnab offers some answers in her enlightening (and well-designed) book Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication (HOW Books, 2008). Macnab lives in Albuquerque and has operated Macnab Design since 1981. Her design work has appeared in Communication Arts; STEP; Print; and Graphis, an international journal of communication media. She is a past president of the Communication Artists of New Mexico and teaches visual literacy at The University of New Mexico. Macnab discusses and signs copies of her book Friday, Sept. 26, at Garcia Street Books and Saturday, Sept. 27, in the art pavilion at the New Mexico Women Authors' Book Festival at Milner Plaza on Museum Hill.

According to Macnab, her reason for writing Decoding Design was "to give visual communicators a reliable — but very creative — method for creating more effective and aesthetic communications. We are all overwhelmed by the vast amount of information we have to filter every day, which technology is increasing at an exponential rate. ... [We need to] pay more attention to nature with more awareness and more appreciation. Every answer we need is there."

Hungarian-born designer and art theorist György Kepes (1906-2001) once stated, "The essential vision of reality presents us not with figurative appearances but with felt patterns of order which have coherence and meaning for the eye and for the mind. Symmetry, balance, and rhythmic sequences express characteristics of natural phenomena: the connectedness of nature — the order, the logic, the living process." This could be Macnab's credo.

It all makes sense, but it's not as simple as Macnab (or Kepes) purports. While many people intuitively sense good design, it helps to be told why a particular design works. She does this in clear and concise language that is instructive and challenging without being pedantic. She examines the intrinsic and associative qualities of numbers and patterns that have been appropriated from nature and their symbolic uses throughout history (going back some 70,000 years). African, Muslim, Native American, Mayan, Aztec, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Buddhist, Islamic, and Celtic design are some of the global examples cited in chapters 0 through 10.

Chapter 0? Macnab explained in an e-mail: "Decoding Design opens with Chapter 0 to give more understanding about how patterns work in nature. ... Chapter 1 [is] about everything integrated into [the numeral] one (I couldn't very well name a chapter about the qualities of the number one 'Chapter 2'). By the time I got through Chapter 2 (two, duality, reproduction and reflection), [the book] began to pick up its own rhythm." Capice?

Chapter by chapter, Macnab addresses the multiple associations of specific numbers. In Chapter 4 she references the four corners of the Earth, the four cardinal points, the four seasons, and the "four particles: protons, electrons, neutrons, and electron neutrinos."
In Chapter 7, we learn that the number seven has a long history of religious connotations and is integral to the Gregorian calendar. Symbolically, she states, "Seven refers to the perfect order of a set of parts that facilitate the completion of a stage." Think of the transition from color to color in a rainbow — there are seven bands. A prime number, seven is also known as the "virgin" number for several reasons; for example, Macnab explains that a heptagon, or seven-sided figure, is "never actually 'born' as other shapes
are" from simpler geometric forms.

She also illustrates how numbers, because of their reflexive qualities, can represent a client's point of view or a company policy or can send subliminal suggestions to a consumer. She does so by reproducing some of her more successful designs as well as those by colleagues from around the world. According to Macnab, "The visual content is drawn from international sources beyond the various disciplines, a great metaphor for how essential it is we acknowledge and respect the world of experience around us."

Macnab deconstructs familiar logos in order to add to our understanding of image, meaning, color, and shape. Ever wonder how the logo for MasterCard came to be — what it represents, the significance of those colors, or the religious symbol manifested by the two overlapping circles?

According to Macnab, the simple design symbolically incorporates the number two. The overlapping circles stand for two Japanese partners who joined forces in 1968, and they also represent commerce between nations. The red circle references the red sun on the Japanese flag, while the golden circle may be seen as the sun of the West — the land of opportunity. The partial fusion of the two circles designates the interaction between business and client and results in a mandorla (almond, in Italian) shape in the middle of the card: the vesica piscis or "Jesus fish."

She explains that mandorlas are common in Eastern and Western cultures and symbolize the union of complementary opposites in life: heaven and earth, divine and human, the self and the shadow, life and death. (Unfortunately, credit cards tend to bring us to the brink of death, thanks to that wonderful cycle of compounding interest.)

Macnab has done her homework for the book and informs us in a matter-of-fact way about other corporate signatures. We learn of the significance of the bull's-eye to Target, the color and square to H&R Block, the twin-tailed siren for Starbucks, and the leaping cat for Eveready Battery (the Eveready cat has a fascinating history originating in feline folk tales and draws on the myth of cats' nine lives).

But her scope is not limited to symbols and logos. She touches on foundations of visual literacy, including an overview of color theory and the various components of the golden ratio or what was referred to as the "divine proportion" during the Renaissance. She uses Leonardo's iconic Vitruvian Man drawing (circa 1489) twice in reference to
symmetry, proportions, and the human body's relationship to numbers one through five.

Macnab told Pasatiempo that her book covers a lot of ground, spanning "art, nature, theoretical physics, mathematics, psychology, and semiotics." In short, design is a big subject. But one needn't be overwhelmed by her premise. Her references to nature and the natural order of things make Decoding Design artfully accessible. And your credit cards will never look the same.

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Maggie Macnab discusses and signs Decoding Design: Understanding and Using Symbols in Visual Communication
5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 26
Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St., 986-0151
12:10 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 27
New Mexico Women Authors' Book Festival art pavilion, Milner Plaza on Museum Hill off Camino Lejo, 877-567-7380