What Happened to the Kid That Was on the Website Banner?
Who was the kid?
We don't know who the kid is. He's a piece of clipart that came with my clipart package.
Is he even Persian?
Does he need to be?
Some people complained
that this
kid doesn't look Persian. He looks like a
Pacific Islander.
He may not be Persian. But it also could turn
out that
if you took
a camera and wandered around Iran snapping
pictures
of kids with
their tongues out you would find kids
that looked
like this. His tongue is sticking out!
Some people were offended to go to the website and be greeted with a kid sticking their tongue out at them.
Why the tongue? AJABAN ZABAN! Get it? AJABAN=amazing and ZABAN=language=tongue, so ajaban zaban means "amazing language" or "isn't language
amazing?" or "amazing tongue!" What we were trying to say with this image is that language is the basis of
cultural integrity, and that language can
also be fun. Finally, we wanted to convey the importance of keeping the
language alive and well in the next generation - hence the picture of
a child.
Why did you change the picture?
He's not Persian and his tongue is sticking out.
Kidding. We loved the picture of the kid. But it was always a temporary fix. To begin
with, our clipart package came with certain rules. We're free to
use the clipart throughout our website in any way we like, EXCEPT
as a logo
for a company. With the
kid up in the corner, people may have mistaken him for the logo
(which he was not). So we
had to change him sooner
or later.
The question was what to replace him with. At first we thought of launching
a "become an ajabanzabAn kid"
campaign to get people to send us pictures of their kids with tongues sticking out.
We still want to have a photogallery of such kids, but not for use in the corner,
because people would now think those new kids are a logo. In the meantime, we have been designing an actual logo,
and what you see in the corner is our new design.
Yes, it's IRAN sticking its tongue out! After all, a land is just
a piece of land, it's the PERSONIFICATION of the land and the LANGUAGE and CUSTOMS of the people
who live on it [and, coincidentally, are often willing to DIE to keep the integrity of
the borders of said land and sometimes to expand the borders of said land]
that make that piece of land into a country.
We love our new logo because nothing says "learn your
country's language" better than an icon of the country sticking it's tongue out.
Become an ajabanzabAn kid
Your Face Here!
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We are still on the look out for MORE kids
(adults too!) with or without their
tongues sticking out to put in an ajabanzabAn kid photogallery. If you want a fun image of
your child celebrating language to be featured in
this website (without compensation - this
is just for the joy of it, of course), please
send us your child's photo (don't forget
the tongue sticking out). If
we feel it captures that
ajabanzabAn spirit, we will (at our sole
discretion) put the pictures up on the website.
For submissions, contact us. |
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