Slogans and One-Liners

Reading and looking at slogans

Most slogans and one-liners on this page are made or selected by Geert Lovink, Koert van Mensvoort and myself. I write slogans. I try to encapsulate the contents into an easily and quickly accessible language. Slogans are short texts that quickly evolve into image, because people start recognising them. Easy to say, easy to read, and it doesn’t need to mean less. Short texts and one-liners used to be used mainly in advertising. But since we started twittering and communicating the whole day long via the media, we can now reckon these short texts to the normal use of language. Short texts do not, by definition, have less content than long texts; they do, however, demand a different way of writing and reading.

Slogans also lend themselves to design. All words that have become icons through fame, repetition and recognition can now be read as image. Short texts become logos if they are given a strong visual character. I predict a democratic world in which people take the responsibility for deciding in which form they communicate, with both text and image. Reading becomes looking and vice versa. We become image readers, because we understand images more rapidly. The slogans I seek, find and mark are generally related to design, criticism, art, style, commerce and image culture.

Below there are a number of slogans from publications; some of them are also published as an oil painting painted by Chinese painters in oil paint city in Xiamen, China: