Good Design // Bad Design is the design blog created by the Southampton based design practice Johnny Toaster. Good Design // Bad Design is dedicated to exploring the good, the bad & the downright ugly.
Logo Lounge have been charting the trends of logo design for the past 8 years and it is now time to witness the trends for this year. Their article (here) goes into great detail, and we wholeheartedly encourage you to read it all, as it helps to educate the designer on the world in which we all are working. However we have stolen some highlights for those of you who are short of time.
First on the list is the Cubist trend. These are logos who’s designers have taken an object and reduced it down to it’s essence, turning these logos into a glorified, and more aesthetically pleasing, version of an image comprised of a handful of pixels.
Spores! These logos are a scaled-back version of a star and just like the Cubist logos these start to take on three dimensional qualities.
A designers task is to attract attention, and these Ghost logos do this by making the viewer engage more. There is a subtle art to the Ghost style logos, leaving something missing makes the viewer double check the logo to make sure of what they have seen.
Next is Tendrils. These are logos created to embrace imperfection. A human has been involved here, and that is the message. The idea being that there is a hand-made message here to reinforce the fact that this is an authentic offer.
Shift logos are deliberate mistakes, the hallmarks of this trend are the misregistered colours normally associated with a broken printer. The purposeful layering gives a nod to connectivity between different entities as they come together for a common good, such as in our logo design for Synergy Solutions.
“One of something ugly is ugly, but many of something ugly is beautiful.” This is the mantra of the Parts trend. One of these elements on their own can be seen as ugly, bring them together and they create something more. This is seen in our logo design for Poolgroove, where the logo can be broken apart and used to create parts of the logos for the other products under the Poolgroove umbrella.
In the digital revolution the pixel is the lowest common denominator, and in the Pixel trend the logos are unashamed of this. They are willing to stand out and say “This is our very essence”.
Next is the Hexahedron trend. By creating these transparent cubes the designer is alluding to the space inside, which gives the viewer the impression they could view this from many different angles – inviting you to explore and become comfortable with it. In fact the best example of this is The Cooper Union logo, just two cubes representing the letters C and U.
The Dust trend understands the importance of hushed tones, whisper and everyone will strain to hear you. This is represented with the stippled effect creates different levels of tone with logo.
With the Peepshow trend it is the image within the image that makes the sale. These logo create the impression of allowing the viewer to see behind these scenes.
Festoon logos are those which have tapering, often overlapping elements. These are designed to create a sense of free spirited, lightheartedness.
The Stains trend creates the impression of the designer hand-drafting the logos with a thick, juicy brush on blotting paper. These logos move beyond the frequently used coffee cup and wine stains to create logos with tonnes of character and movement.
When competing in a look-at-me contest the firework always wins. This is the approach taken by the Burst trend. These logos create a sense of visual adrenaline and imbue your company with energy.
A silhouette of a woman’s head is no more than this until you imagine what she might be thinking. The Wallpaper trend blends the demure with the flamboyant, embedding your logo with intense patterns makes them leap from the page.
Text has become as critical in logo design as ever. Logos are increasingly having to communicate many things and designers have started to capture this information and group it together – this is the hallmark of the Box-Up trend. There is no possibility of confusion here.
Coca Cola have released a new energy drink, and in a effort to promote this they have launched a series of films showcasing the talents of real life characters from the skating, snowboarding and music communities. The first of which (shown above) is a video of some skateboarders on fire, apparently this is not effects – they actually were set on fire to record this. We are assured that none were injured because of this.
The other two films are straight documentaries. The first shown here is Peepshow, which follows the efforts of young female snowboarders, who push their bodies as far as they can to show off their skills. The second is called Playground and showcases the talents of a young Philadelphia rapper who’s signature is to use the world around him to create beats to rap over.
What is refreshing here is the complete lack of a “drink this and be awesome” slogan.
The future of the music industry is a hot topic these days, with consumers purchasing music online, physical releases are becoming less and less popular. So the market for these products is changing and record companies are becoming aware of the need to make these products more desirable (as discussed in a previous post ‘A Good Physical Release’).
The new ultra deluxe special collectors edition boxed set is of Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back album. At $299 (about £195) this is an item for true collectors only however this lavish release comes with a massive amount of extras. In the above picture, from left to right we have:
Top Row – Full colour gloss laminated box, special double CD pack and a numbered and signed 12×12 inch art print.
Bottom Row – 12 inch vinyl pressing with exclusive artwork, 4GB USB key containing a full studio quality version of the album encased in a laser engraved foam block and a certificate of authenticity.
We found these great minimalist movie posters on Deer Brains, and thought they were so good we had to share them with you. Although, unfortunately, we have no idea who actually created them…
Last week Jonathan Barnbrook released his book, ‘The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts’ to resounding condemnation from the design community. The Creative Review blog post about the book offers surprising little opinion on the book (instead stating that they will be reviewing the visualisation of data as a whole at a later date), however if you browse through the comments on the post you get a reasonably strong anti-Barnbrook vibe. The general sentiment from these seems to be that the only reason it is being discussed is because it is by Barnbrook.
Blogs like Visualising Data,Feltron and Infosthetics have taken the offensive line in this discussion. Visualising Data have labeled one spread as being possibly the worst graph ever and Feltron even going as far to re-design one of the pages.
Good Design // Bad Design is going to stay out of the raging debate, and simply say that perhaps if Barnbrook wanted to make his shocking book truly shocking then maybe he has succeeded. This work fits the manifesto of The Anti Design Festival very nicely, and his association with the event might go towards explaining the choices made with his work for The Little Book of Shocking Facts. Our self initiated project Oxymorons might have been received with similar views if we were as established as Jonathan Barnbrook.
Earlier I blogged that our two favourite things are typography and music. In at third place is wine, which has lead us to discover the wonderful artwork created by Louise Fili LTD.
Louise Fili has had quite an illustrious career in design (which I won’t go into detail here, but if you wish you can read about it here) and her designs seem to have travelled through time to be with us in 2010. Our favuorites are shown above, her work for Polander Selections, but her work seems to be timeless while taking inspiration from throughout the history of design.
The Anti Design Festival is the brainchild of design hero Neville Brody, aiming to challenge the “pretty commerciality of the London Design Festival”. The festival will give designers a chance to exhibit work which has either failed with clients, or to produce entirely new work without restrictions. Confirmed contributors include Jonathan Barnbrook, Stuart Semple and Stefan Sagmeister.
Being an entirely non profit organisation the ADF cannot pay for contributions, however if you wish to get involved the deadline for submissions is Friday 13th August and details on how to get involved can be found here.
Yves Peters at fontfeed.com has just restarted his ‘My Type of Music’ blog up again, combining Our two favourite things – typography and music.
‘My Type of Music’ analyses the typography on album covers, taking into consideration the kind of music and imagery it is being associated with. What is refreshing about this blog is how inclusive it is, Peters looks at all genres and all eras, covering the likes of Lil Jon, Wolf Parade, Melvins and Hanson.
PS. check out what happens when you roll-over the Font Feed logo,we love this!
As a follow up to their D&AD winning video last year Tom Wrigglesworth and Matt Robinson have been commissioned to create this story told via three HP printers.
Helvetica is supposedly the world’s favourite typeface, however due is its popularity Helvetica has turned into a Marmite typeface, some designers would use it for almost everything whereas others shun it for its neutrality and label those who use it as being unimaginative.
No one has ever gone quite as far Bruno Maag, who has always viewed Helvetica with a mixture of bemusement and irritation, comparing its poor construction and misuse with Comic Sans and Arial. With this in mind he has created Aktiv Grotesk, an alternative (or improvement) to Helvetica. For Maag’s full argument against Helvetica check out his interview at Creative Review.
