Circles and Dots

The world is rounder than you think

Communicating with Pattern: Circles and Dots celebrates the roundest, spottiest and dottiest in every design discipline. Circles and spheres represent unity and collaboration, from Venn diagrams to globes and roundtables. As the first shapes that toddlers learn to draw and recognize, circles communicate friendliness and comfort, and are the most common devices in corporate logos and information point design, from the London Underground and Paris RER logos to Disney¡¯s Mickey Mouse—a design classic that brings together every aspect of the vocabulary of circles. Dots, meanwhile, present detail, information, and also absent information.

But circles and dots can also be bold, confident, radical, and revolutionary, from Eero Aarnio¡¯s bubble chairs, to Damien Hirst¡¯s designs via the iMac, and the imaginative sweep of Frank Lloyd Wright¡¯s buildings. Circles show the big picture, dots the small; circles clarify, while dots are often mistaken for noise.