No smoke

Territory creative director Lee Fasciani explores the well-crafted smoking symbol, a neatly formed icon that’s both elegant and straightforward. The ubiquitous smoking symbol has been around ever since I can remember. Although I don’t smoke, it has always fascinated me from a design perspective – the stylised smoke is beautifully crafted giving balance and authority to the symbol. The smoke has been drawn with subtle variations on line thickness with a level of detail often associated with type design.

The definition of a good symbol or icon is its ability to clearly communicate a message in an instant, across cultures, languages and decades, irrespective of trends or styles. They need to be timeless. The smoking symbol is one such example. In its simple constitution of the three parts of cigarette, ash and smoke, it immediately denotes its message: whether that be smoking 'allowed' or 'prohibited' with the addition of the red circle and bar. Whilst the smoke could have been represented with complicated curls or heavy 'clouds', instead it is indicated with smooth, elegant curves, with the vertical bars of 'ash' connecting them to the cigarette itself. No person or disembodied hand is included, or needed – this symbol has been distilled to its clearest form.

Its longevity speaks for itself.

territorystudio.com


Lee Fasciani

…has been interested in type design since he was a teen and has created over twenty typefaces which are sold via T26 in Chicago and Typetrust. Working for the likes of Nike, Yahoo!, Nokia, Virgin Atlantic, Conde Nast, Vogue and LG Electronics, he’s now creative director of Territory, a London-based studio whose technical design approach mixes intuitive, user-centric experiences with solid design.
Smoking

This guilty pleasure (or bad habit depending on how you look at it) dates back to 5000BC, where it developed as an extension of incense-based rituals. Today, fifteen billion cigarettes are puffed worldwide every day. Each cigarette smoked reduces the smoker’s expected life span by eleven minutes, something taken into account by life insurers who will charge a thirty-year-old smoker around a third more than their health-conscious equivalent, and nearly twice as much when you get to fifty. Astonishingly, breathing in the air in Mumbai for just one day is the equivalent to smoking 113 cigarettes, according to the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board.