Dirty & Clean Magnet

"Hmm, those mugs look clean but that plate has fresh jam on it. Did someone accidentally add dirty dishes to the clean dishwasher or will I be emptying dirty dishes to be used again?" Living with people makes it tough to know the current dishwasher status so I made this magnet to clear things up. It reads "Dirty" with one side up and "Clean" when rotated 180 degrees. I learned this word-writing technique from a friend when I was a young kid. Yeah, we spent the entire weekend incorporating hilarious words into our names.

How can you do it? Draw a grid with one box for each letter in the word and fill in the letters. Rotate the paper 180 degrees and write the other word (or the same word!) above the letters for word 1, matching up the letters. Next, try to merge each vertical letter pair into a symbol that maintains the visual characteristics of both letters. Some letter combinations are much easier than others. If the words you're using don't have the same number of letters, you'll have to double some up and visually represent both of them from one side and but only one letter from the other way.

For this word pair, the "IR" & "∀Ǝ" combination gave me some trouble since the "I" couldn't be drawn expressively enough to be an upside down "A" and still look like an "I". For this reason I decided to combine the shapes. Once I had the general ideas for the letters, I refined them again to reinforce certain visual cues.

The real kicker? After designing, cutting the vinyl and applying it to a giant magnet, I discovered that our dishwasher door isn't metal and the magnet wouldn't adhere. Damn. Hopefully it can still assert its relevance over the dishwasher from the refrigerator.

Like this idea? Download the Illustrator (.ai) file and make your own!