May 18th, 2012 | Filed under: Design, Film and Video | Add a Comment »
One of my favorite places to view high-end graphic design and branding is iTunes Movie Trailers. Don’t judge. These posters and trailer pages have exactly one chance to make an impression, and they know it. You’ll find some original and quality stuff here, because these studios are spending millions and they want every penny to count.
That said, there’s also plenty of forgettable design that runs on the page. Action movies tend to look like action movies, and you can spot a rom-com or a buddy comedy a mile away. But a little while back, I mentioned that I was surprised by the art direction in the trailer for Snow White & the Huntsman, stating that it managed to promote something at really looked fresh.
On that note, Snow managed to pull the same trick on me again today — pleasantly surprising me with something I hadn’t seen before. Take a look at the promotional image below. You can read it instantly (which makes it very commercial, not obscure or confusing), but the more you look at it, the more disturbing it becomes. Look at the eye on that crow. Raven. Whatever. That is not a bird eye.
This is some good design. (Not to be confused with horrifying, nightmare-inducing bad human-eye-on-animal design of the past.) This is memorable, iconic, appealing, and disturbing.
Already inclined to be happy with them, I opened their trailer page, and was happy all over again. The stark black-and-white aesthetic continues, with an image that was designed with expert care for the iTunes preview page and no other location on earth. You just love to see this kind of craft go a piece of work.
Look how that owns the page. The trailer page demands a white top and a black content area … but this design takes that requirement and makes it classy, epic, and exciting. I think the key word here is restraint. Instead of filling the promotional images with a lineup of leads, explosions, magical creatures, or what-have-you, they’ve reduced their design to a stark, minimal, and memorable set of images that stand out head and shoulders on the page, while filling them with enough richness of detail to reward closer inspection.
To be clear, this isn’t an endorsement of this movie or any of its leads (none of whom are my favorites) … but it’s a ringing endorsement for the art direction choices made thus far. However the film pans out, this is one beautiful bit of fully-concepted and restrained design.
May 15th, 2012 | Filed under: Design | Add a Comment »
I posted about this a year and a half ago, and it’s still true today — this little scrap of paper, included in a shipment exactly as shown here, is one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen. It’s poorly sized, written, and laid out, and represents a perfect storm of design innocence.
This is in a box somewhere at home … I need to find it and re-tape it to my wall here at work. I love this piece of paper.
May 14th, 2012 | Filed under: Art Theory, Design | 1 Comment »
Courtesy of Matchstic (who you should really be following, because they’re amazing):
“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry. Design broadens perception, magnifies experience, and enhances vision. Design is the product of feeling and awareness, of ideas that originate in the mind of the designer and culminate, one hopes, in the mind of the spectator.”
Paul Rand
Happy Monday Morning thoughts for those of us sipping coffee, cracking knuckles, and clicking Creative Suite icons in the dock.
March 28th, 2012 | Filed under: Design, Sketchbook | 2 Comments »
There’s nothing as legitimizing as seeing your work in print.
March 20th, 2012 | Filed under: Design | Add a Comment »
While it wasn’t fun to be stuck in a motionless Metro car for an extra ten minutes due to mechanical failures on the Yellow Line train in front of us, it did afford me time to be extra observant of my surroundings — which is when I noticed this guy.
It’s an apt warning.
March 12th, 2012 | Filed under: Art Theory, Design | Add a Comment »
I’ve been thinking about design culture, and the way in which designers interact with clients and audiences. If I could invite designers to do one thing, it would be to “Design by love” … that is, let love inform how they do their work. Lots of times, this list overlaps with simple professionality (which can be sadly lacking in the design community), but it goes even farther than that. It’s a philosophy of designing with affection and respect for those who don’t wield CS5, and I’ve found it to be useful in my own life.
This is just a bare bones outline, more for my own use than anyone else, but I thought someone out on the great wide web might find it interesting. So here it is … how to design by love:
Hospitable
- Design that which welcomes & sets at ease. Even if the goal is to disturb, do so in a way that draws the viewer in, taking them and their background into account.
- Don’t throw your design out into a void and say, “This is my design, take it or leave it. I don’t care who you are or what you think, I know it’s good.”
Respectful
- Of the client: take stock of the fact that if they’re hiring you, they are a professional who is knowledgeable about their field (a field in which you, 99.9% of the time, are the ignorant newcomer).
- Of the audience: realize that those receiving your piece live in a visually sophisticated society, and will not accept mediocrity.
Compassionate
- Co-passionate: make the client’s goal your own.
- Make the audience’s needs your own.
Spiritual
- Realize that you, the person, are a smaller part of a bigger picture, and have need of help, inspiration, and perspective.
- Submit yourself to your higher authority.
Humble
- Every criticism moves the design forward to completion.
- There is always more to learn.
Personal
- Personality is different from ego: ego replaces your the client’s priorities with your own, personality enriches.
- It’s about the project, not about you.
Generous
- Listen to your client’s requests and give them what they want. (What they want may be different — better — than what they ask for. Explain how and why.
- Be excited about what you have to offer, and share that excitement.
