This is just too good to pass up.
After attending the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts last week, I started following a bunch of friendly new people on Twitter–not necessarily because I had met them, but because they tweeted with the #icfa hashtag. But a couple of the Twitter profiles were identified with names but not images, leaving me to wonder, “Did I meet or see this person at the conference?”
Naturally, I turned to Google Images, searching for a couple of names to try to match faces with names. Then, for fun, I tried a Google search for ICFA.
And holy smokes–look what I found:
- The International Committee for Future Accelerators
- The International Cemetery and Funeral Association (which at some point added another C for Cremation)
- The International Custody and Fund Administration
- The International Cage Fighting Alliance
- The Insulating Concrete Form Association
- The International Carp Fishing Association
- The International Casual Furnishings Association
- Institut de Consulaire de Formation en Alternance
- The International Conference on Functional Acrylates
- The International Children’s Football Academy
Note that 9 out of 11 (counting my conference) use the I as International, though only #8 isn’t in English (though #10 is based in the Netherlands). Also notice how the final A is used: usually as Association, but also as Administration, and (my favorite) as Alliance.
But even more intriguing is the visual rhetoric of the logos used by all these different organizations. I mean, of the following, how many of the following images are obviously attached to one of the above organizations (or would be without the words in the image)? Generic icon-creation is intriguing from a visual rhetoric perspective: is it better to be safe, yet bland?
Which leads to the pressing question of authenticity. That is, which is the real ICFA, and which is the . . .