How to sharpen a pencil.

A finished assignment. The votes are in and pencil sharpener seems to have won out over scuba mask (whew!)

These are drawn in the style of 'Isotype,' made most popular by a gentleman named Otto Neurath. I'm sure you're familiar with some of his work, or at least the derivatives that have followed.

Essentially, isotypes are pictograms, meant to be culturally universal and explicit in meaning. Mr. Neurath and his compatriots created bucketloads of these figures during the late 1920s and 30s as a means of representing communication more visually, thereby bringing greater understanding of complex subjects and data to the masses. Written language was (and still is) terribly inaccessible to a huge sector of the population, and Neurath sought to create a more equitable form of communication. I love that! You can read more here.