Brimming with bright hues and bold forms, the work of French designer, Fanette Mellier, is hard to ignore. I’m especially drawn to the identity system she crafted for Frac Aquitaine, an art museum in Bordeaux. At its center is a logo made from a reflected “A”. This emblem resembles the arrows of a compass and guides the viewer’s eye throughout the documents. It is also used to mark gutter folds in brochures, separate paragraphs, and is often superimposed over photos.
Good Apples crafts brand identities and digital experiences for a wide breadth of clients. Especially impressive is their collaboration with OZO Coffee Company in which they developed the visual identity and packaging. After modernizing the brand’s logos, typefaces, and color palettes, the studio created over 50 pictograms to represent the different qualities of the roasts. These symbols are gorgeously displayed on merchandise, apparel, and packaging. I’m particularly fond of the animal icons that signify the regions from which the coffee originated.
Luke Lucas is a talented typographer whose lettering has graced the covers of magazines, the walls of office buildings, and everything in between. From old style serifs to 3D scripts, he’s tackled numerous styles and often utilizes fun textures to give a unique personality to each piece. I am especially impressed with the details within his compositions. His dynamic shading and line work add a gorgeous layer of depth to his letterforms.
Studio Makgill crafts beautiful work that is deeply inspired by their clients’ passions. While crafting the identity for the brewery Wiper and True, Makgill noticed the company’s fascination with nature and the biological process of fermentation. This motivated them to create a packaging system that depicts examples of how humans have used nature to their own advantage. The bottles feature illustrations of elephants performing at circuses, hot air balloons floating in the wind, and much more.
Siobhán Gallagher’s wit and charm shines through her personal illustrations and self-published zines. Her hilariously relatable comics and writings depict the struggles of awkward social interactions, big city living, and modern tragedies such as accidentally liking a crush’s old Instagram photo. This knack for successfully translating contemporary strife has led Gallagher to create editorial illustrations for prominent publications such as MIT Technology Review and Bust. Her collaborative efforts with illustrator John F. Malta are also quite impressive. Together they’ve edited an anthology of apocalyptic art, titled Till Doomsday, and published two editions of their zine, We Out Here. To get your hands on Gallagher’s work, check out her new book, In A Daze Work: A Pick-Your-Path Journey Through the Daily Grind, which was released this July.
Between the first show Poster by Daeki Shim, Hyojun Shim
The 2018 A’Design Award & Competition is now open for submissions. The prestigious event features over 100 categories and will be judged by a panel of esteemed designers, scholars, and members of the press. In addition to receiving the A’Design trophy, winners will obtain career development services, invitations to exclusive design clubs, and other great prizes. The contest accepts applications for realized and conceptual projects from students and professionals. Register now to participate.
For today’s post we’ve highlighted a small sampling of past winners, including favorites from the Packaging and Print categories.
Masquespacio is an award-winning creative consultancy that focuses on graphic and interior design. Their skill for integrating the two art forms is especially evident in their collaboration with the furniture company Missana. To celebrate Missana’s 20th anniversary, the studio revamped the brand with contemporary colors, materials, and textures. These elements were incorporated into the website, catalog, and a new line of furniture called The Novelties Collection. To display the new assortment of products, they designed vibrant exhibition spaces like the one seen above. Finally, Masquespacio crafted The Toadstool Collection, their own line of furniture that features mushroom-like seats, a table, and a sofa bench. The pieces were highly inspired by the Memphis movement of the 1980s and the architecture of Michael Graves.
A Practice for Everyday Life is a London-based studio founded by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas. Since 2003, they’ve crafted sleek and sophisticated designs for a variety of clients including schools, exhibitions, and fashion brands. I’m especially smitten with their work for Drawing Futures, a conference focused on speculative drawing and its connection to architecture. While branding the event, the studio created Lining Gothic, a custom typeface with squared-off angles. The typeface’s unique attributes accentuate the strong structural nature of the wordmark and its resemblance to an architectural drawing.
Werklig strives to design with purpose and create brands that are “built on truth, not fake stories”. One of my favorite brands they developed is Suomen Jäätelö, a Finnish ice cream company. Especially impressive is the packaging: an unconventionally shaped tub that is covered in a striking pattern. The marbled nature of the graphic is inspired by the perfect elasticity and thickness of the ice cream. It connotes the smooth frostiness of the product and also gives the brand a modern and playful personality.
Another great packaging project is their bottles for Galipette, a French apple cider. The roundness of the bottles and labels are inspired by the company’s name, which translates to “somersault”. Wanting to allude to the rural history of cider and attract an urban audience, Werklig utilized both traditional and contemporary typefaces to craft labels that are “distinctly French and elegant but with a modern twist”.
Bohuy Kim is a Korean graphic designer who runs the studio Odd Hyphen. A strong believer in creative experimentation, he regularly pursues self-initiated projects such as the poster series Visual Impact. In this collection, he plays with unique typography, 3D illustration, and distortion techniques to explore subjects such as concealment, text, and the vicissitudes of patterns. Many of these elements are also present in his promotional posters for the Goopang art group where he employs abstract compositions and neon color schemes with striking effect.
