“I learned about “iconography” from working with Rob Schrab for several years. In cartooning, you have to draw a certain combination of lines before the audience is going to universally recognize what you’ve drawn.
“If I draw a cylinder, I can tell you it’s a banana, but I can’t make you think “banana” on your own unless I make it yellow, taper the ends and give it some curvature. To further extend this metaphor: Sometimes bananas are green in real life. If I make a green, tapered, curved cylinder, does it look like a banana? It looks like a pepper. You can jump up and down and scream about how you just drew a perfectly good banana, because it looks just as much like a real banana as a yellow one (student filmmaker), but I’m telling you, dude, it’s a fucking pepper, UNTIL you put more time and energy into giving it OTHER recognizable banana qualities- for instance, drawing it half peeled. Okay, now it’s a green banana. You blew my mind.
Dan Harmon
http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_106:_Five_Minute_Pilots
When creating we like to be different, unique or ‘creative’, unless it can be recognized as a banana it can fall flat. We suffer from the curse of knowledge, we know if it is a banana but the player/audience doesn’t unless it looks like one.
snippets of cloud 