So the the American Institute of Graphics Arts (AIGA for short) and the U.S. Department of Transportation released a set of 50 universal symbols “copyright-free” online. The symbols are “designed for use at the crossroads of modern life: in airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events.” They are intended to be clearly legible from a distance and comprehensible to people of different ages and cultures.

Iain Anderson took these images and produce a digital short called “airport”, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. As Iain says “I’m especially happy to see many blogs in different languages linking to airport, especially as that was the idea. I mean, the symbols were meant for international word-free understanding, it only makes sense that the animation should be word-free and universally understandable too.”