I had the privilege of designing 30 graphical pieces for typeToday – a font foundry. Each video is accompanied by a story that's dear to my heart an uses a new font

Bone flutes are probably the oldest musical instruments. Be it a bone of a cow or a swan, or even a mammoth tusk– the mechanics are very similar. The oldest one can date as far as 40.000 years ago

The trick of overcompensating is everywhere in visual arts. Just as a plane pilot or a sailing captain should aim to miss the final target – fly in the ;'wrong' direction so that the wind would steer it precisely to the correct landing strip. So is the neverending quest to show a distorted image, that, when perceived, would look more truthful, than just the photorealistic reproduction. 'Minnesota declaration' by Werner Herzog is a crucial document about exactly that for me. 'By dint of declaration, the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants'.

There's a fantastic biblical story about how the things we look at form us. In Genesis 30 Jacob bargains for a price for his work with Laban: ... Let me go through all your flocks today and remove from them every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark-colored lamb and every spotted or speckled goat. They will be my wages. however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.

One of the concepts that help the most with how visual arts function comes from a theory proposed by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay on Tolstoy form 1917: - ' ... art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects' 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.'

Some signals from the past are absurdly clear. Here's the drawing on the birch tree bark ('beresta') of a very young boy, from whom we know several such messages. His name was Onfim and he lived in Novgorod, in the 13th century and most of the messages left are grammar exercises from school. Still, in his spare time, he wanted to be a hero on horseback (aren't we all) – that's how he depicted himself, slaying an enemy.

As much as I love to rationalise the structure of an image, we should always be wary of what Edward Tufte warned us about – that's it's impossible to talk about the structural aspect of a 3D object, basing our guesses on a single 2D image. The moment we turn our object ever so slightly, all the mental constructions fail – these types of explanatory schemes can only be three- dimensional when describing a three-dimensional object.