Communicating Clean Lines

This furniture company does it perfectly.

Making Protein Look Tasty

"Probar is a high performance energy bar made from whole, raw foods. Each flavor is a different mix of fruits, nuts, berries, and seeds. Unlike most energy bars, Probar’s ingredients are natural and recognizable. Moxie Sozo was hired to redesign Probar’s entire product line. After the new launch, sales increased dramatically, market share improved, and the company picked up numerous new retail accounts.” No surprises here, except in the packaging! Who would have thought you could make a product look so tasty from the outside -- especially in a product category that in everyone's minds seem to be antonyms of delicious and filling. The use of color is spectacular, and the collages are beautiful enough for me to justify the purchase... even if the bar does taste like crap.

Obama Administration Designs

With the 2008 Presidential election now in the past, we've become well aware of the potential effects "good" design can have... the ability to represent values, induce emotions, and give people a visual with which to associate and rally. So if presidential logos can have a "feel good effect," can the Obama Administration's government-sponsored logos do the same? In early March, President Obama unveiled the logos for two economic recovery programs of his own: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (Tiger). He said: "These emblems are symbols of our commitment to you the American people," and that they will remind the public "that your government is putting the economy back on the road to recovery." Steve Juras, creative director of Chicago firm Mode Project (that collaborated on the campaign "O" logo) led designers Aaron Draplin (Draplin Design Co.) and Chris Class (Wire & Twine) to creating the match for these logos. I can't even imagine the restrictions of freelancing for the White House, but what a nice porfolio piece! Juras said: "It was explictly stated that the ARRA logo not look 'governmental'.... We were asked to create a 'visible sign of progress' in a contemporary way while referencing energy, education and health care. The goals for Tiger were even simpler: use a tiger motif to speak to the Dept. of Transportation's new initiative, and be sure to include 'USDOT' somewhere in the mark.'" Sounds simple enough, but the turnaround was in under 4 days! Impressive. Well, just like the Obama O was atypical as far as presidential logos were concerned, the administration is definitely making a departure in its visual communication. I applaud the contemporary style and direction as the unifying aesthetic for this administration's designs, but I worry that the logos will lose their official, serious air and be hard to distinguish from other logos being designed today in the nongovernmental sector.

Sending Dots from Abroad

Simon Mortimer, in his final year at Lincoln School of Art and Design, designed this piece titled "Dot 2 Dot." It's a typographic experiment using connect the dots to spell out well-known worldly greetings on postcards. The words include ola, aloha, hello, bonjour, guten tag, and ciao. While the idea is original and I like the interactive aspect of the postcard, the color palette seems a bit dated to me... yet so are postcards, no?

Spell It Out

Below is work of recent University of Portsmouth graduate Jodie Silby, who created a "Portsmouth Vernacular" map using words to create directional lines of the map. The map presents the geography of the city in addition to the dialect and language that's used around it. In addition to an introduction to the map, there is an alphabetical index and translations for mapped dialect. I think the work is both visually and conceptually interesting, but I wonder if having a map of a more well-traveled city would make the map more enticing.

Why Milk?

I've noticed lately that milk cartons seem to be the "go-to" object for packaging experimentation. Understandably, the white multi-sided carton provides a designer with much flexibility, as shown below, but why not redesign the actual carton as well?

Christina, a senior at Texas A & M University Commerce in Dallas, designed a can and milk carton design for Sprouts Farmers Market, "a grocery store that incorporates local farmer's products into their produce department.... The cans and milk cartons are designed for the simple metro life. Quick and easy to figure out what is in the can without words or the overused picture of the food on the front of the product." I absolutely love the style; the use of simple icons and recognizable colors will send a clear, direct message to shoppers.

Monika Ostaszewska, a graduate from the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, takes a very different approach to milk. Her graduation project, "Flavours of Podlasie," embraces the ornamental style of the region that was based on a typical pattern of double-warp fabrics from the Podlasie region of Poland (close to the eastern border of Poland).


Lastly, David Fung, a recent graphic design graduation from the Rochester Institute of Technology School of Design wanted to "use the standard milk carton as the canvas to create a clean, modern, and functional design yet still approachable for the average consumer." While I like the illustrated splash and the typography is nicely set, the color scheme seems a bit out of place.

Making a Difference with the ABC's

Animalphabet is a typographic collaborative project between 16 artists around the world, where each creates a letter formed as a real or invented animal. The letters have joined together as a limited edition poster (only 500 are being printed), and the profit will be donated to Unicef. The artists include:

Tauba Auerbach (US), Lisa Jeannin (BEL), Jan Kruse, Human Empire (GER), Mike Perry (US), Andy Rementer (US), Rui Tenreiro (NO), Stuart White (UK), Maja Sten (SWE), Geoff Mcfetridge (US), Chris Hopkins (JP), Evan B Harris (US), Luke Best (UK), Espen Friberg, Yokoland (NO), Sara Nilsson (SWE), Joseph Hart (US), Nan Na Hvas, Sofie Hannibal (DK), Kristoffer Busch (SWE), Åsa Klingberg (SWE), Christopher Davison (US), Andreas Samuelsson (SWE), Mélodie Mousset, Tatiana Rihs (CH), Holly Stevenson (US), Oscar Bauer, Ewan Robertson (UK), Christopher Green (UK), Megan Whitmarsh (US), and Marcus Oakley (UK).


Details of a few of the letters:

Patterned Packaging

These designs are beautiful, refined, ornamental, and colorful. Featured first is for the Brooklyn based artisan chocolate brand, Mast Brothers Chocolate, followed by packaging for Lucia Soaps. Apparently, the Mast Brothers' is just wrapped in Florentine paper from Rossi, and they stick a custom label on it. Regardless, I worry that the aesthetics are too similar that I might end up putting soap in my mouth instead of chocolate...

Obsession with Obama in Food?

First it was cupcakes, and now it's breakfast cereal. Here is a presidential portrait by Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev made with Froot Loops. I suppose it's a Joe Sixpack version of Seurat's paintings?

Extremes of Perfume Design

Here are two designs that sit on entirely different sides of the perfume packaging spectrum. The first perfume, featured in GOOD Magazine, was ironically created by a perfumer who hates perfume. To channel his frustration, Christopher Brosius created a line of pleasant and nostalgic perfumes... "a variety of whimsical, subtle fragrances like 'Winter 1972,' 'I am a Dandelion,' and 'In the Library.'" The design is simple and has a quaint medicinal quality. There is a nice arrangement of typography that emphasizes each unique scent and still the collection as a whole. Meanwhile, Le Ettes, a French-Austiran perfume producer, wanted to be just as explicit about its point of view with perfume: "I wanted it to be really girly and colorful and at the same time have a functional and easy system for scalable product lines." Denmark designer Emil Kozak did just that, playing with the circles and dots from the company's logo and using one color for each product line's packaging. According to Emil, the bottles are “lightweight, compact, shatter resistant and re-usable."

More Inspiring Work from Pentagram

The identity for Free the Word, a festival of world literature, was completed by Harry Pearce and his design team at Pentagram. Pentagram designed the identity and the mark for the inaugural festival in 2008. The execution is superb -- animation help from firm AllofUs truly marries the design solution with the name and concept behind the festival. The festival is hosted by International PEN, a worldwide association of writers that promotes international cultural cooperation in literature. Below is the animated version of the logo (used as an identifier at events throughout the festival) and a poster for the event.

deSIGNS

DJ Stout and his team at Pentagram (Austin) designed Signs, a collaboration with Texas musician Joe Ely and photographers Michael O'Brien and Randal Ford, which focuses on the issue of homelessness. The book features a series of homeless signs that Ely collected over the years, and his forward recounts his brief experience of homelessness at age 17. The sign collection was photographed by Ford and is juxtaposed with portraits of the homeless that were shot by O'Brien. Here is a sampling of the signs, which show an array of handwriting that when seen together is quite spectacular and awesome.

Catching Up

I haven't been able to post in a long time, so the upcoming posts will be a collection of seemingly random images that caught my eye over the past few weeks: A typographic world map. Very clever design, but the random breaks in typography impede legibility. I also think that the monotone colors are too grim-- the background color (water) should have been more set off from the land