All done

Well that was fun now wasn't it? I was at first very wary of what I was going to do with this blog and about how my grades were going to look, but I seem to have worried about nothing. Thank-you to my classmates for you're many comments, I enjoyed reading everyone of them! I am not sure what I am going to do with this blog now that the school semester is over. We'll see If I keep this blog going. For now I am just going to leave it as is, so tah tah for now.

Cheers,
Melanie

More Tea?

    I really like this can which is for Earl Grey Tea from the Empress hotel. The gold accents on the black with the grey swirls make for an interesting design. The designers chose to use a serif text to compliment the idea of tea being for posh people. The logo sticks out from the rest of the can because of the surrounding black and bordered by the "F' swirl design. the same is true for a little blurb that is on the right picture which is also bordered. Some how they were able to fit information from where the tea came to the the companies name and logo to the website all in a neat little package. The grey upraised part of the can looks like an intricate Celtic art but on closer inspection is actually the Fairmonts "F" layered on top of itself.

That's all for today,

Cheers,
Melanie

Bright colours and multitudes of dots

    Whoops, I forgot it was Tuesday today. So as promised last week I have some cool Graphic Design that I picked up in the Vancouver Art Gallery.
    Today I bring you Ken Lum's a Users guide. The coolest fold out I've seen:

 

 

This is how it looks when one picks it up. The colours burn.

Underneath the pink.

A break from the colours.

This is the inside when opened.

This is the outside when completely opened.

   This one is actually really hard to critique, because of it's uniqueness. But I can definitely say that it attracted my eyes right away with the bright colours. It also makes the person want to keep opening just because the the way it opens and the bold colours it carries though out the brochure. The way they used the gray triangles worked very well as you can see with the back view, it really gives a nice break for your eyes as you look through it. The layout for the body copy is nice and neat and placed where it is able to be read easily and the paragraphs are uniform. I don't know what they were trying to accomplish with the dots but it is interesting although it could be called clutter as well. Over all a very cool piece of graphic design and something I haven't seen before.

Cheers,
Melanie

Van City

    This is something I picked up at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was free and cool so what the hey. I really like the way they used instructions to make some interesting points. The fact that the only colour on the page are the "instructions" which draw the eye. I like how they used the lines to make it dynamic and movement. The writing makes one want to read and draws the eye in. The logo We:vancouver is bold and sticks out and creates hierarchy. Since this is a poster for a gallery about Vancouver and it's history and how it could improve I can see how the lines almost form a sort of simple road map. I really just like how the whole thing is simple and has a lot of white space.

   I have something else from the gallery but it seems I misplaced it so I have to find it first.

Cheers,
Melanie

Apfleminze goodness

    Haha some more international stuff. This time it's some apple mint tea my mom brought home from Germany. She had brought two teas this one and another, they both are apple something, and both are loose leaf but I opened this one first because it caught my eye. This is definitely the normal bag type for tea, closing with a fold and a tie at the top and the normal triangular shape. but the cool thing about it is the subtle vertical lines that are on the paper which adds a delicate interest to the bag with out going overboard. The label also uses the subtle shapes in the background to draw the eye with out making it an eye sore. This same design is used in the box which is placed at the top as sort of grid placer with the information following the same placement. I also think the use of only one colour, green, helps keeping the information in the forefront. I like the use of only one font too and the use of caps to make the eye go to the companies name directly after the flavour. Good hierarchy (as much as I can tell because I can't read the rest...).

Next time I'll actually get something from Nanaimo,
Melanie


This was on a website my mom's friend sent to her. It's a South African website about pet health care. Might I say that South Africans are weird...

PRONUTRO

    This week we had to find good design. I've been feeling sick so I looked around the house and I found these boxes in my recycling. This is my all time favourite cereal, it's kind of like Cream of Wheat but ten times better. This is what I ate as a kid in South Africa and since then the box has dramatically changed. My favourite thing about this box used to be the little facts on the other side which was in both Afrikaans and English. Now it's just adds and sports things in only English.  

     Childhood memories aside the the design of the front is interesting to say the least. There is a lot of movement in the picture with the cereal in the bowl having swirl highlights which is carried on by the white swoosh in the back and the halftone dots which are also carried on into the background. Even the title and sub heading helps with the movement. The bold title really draws the eye to it especially in the "original" one. The designers had to fit in lots of information with still keeping space which I think they did well. Just from looking at the pictures you can tell it's wheat free, made of corn or something like that and in the case of the chocolate flavored one you can tell right away that is that flavor. The only thing I don't really like about the design is how the title is kerned and the halftone on the bottom which is black and distracts from the title and other information.

anyways hopefully we're back to school soon,

Melanie

The Crystal Goblet by Beatrice Warde

    I partially of agree with what Beatrice Warde says in her essay about invisible text. She is right about how body type should be invisible because the audience needs to understand what the words mean not what they look like. As she puts it "type well used is invisible as type" (1). Meaning the ideas and the conversation the words are visible and not the forms of the words themselves. She uses the wine glass as an example to say this. The wine glass must be invisible in order for the wine amateurs to speculate on the wine its self. Where I do not agree with her is that type in its forms and lines are in themselves beautiful and so should be used just to show off what they really are. The fine differences and subtleties of for example Caslon or Baskerville separate them as their own and I believe that this makes them unique just as any other well made type. Type can show off the meaning of a by just the change to italics or to bold or by colour or the angle among other things. It is the balance of when to show off the beauty or the type and when to show of the meaning of the word that should decide how text be used.

   What I tried to show with my picture was the fact that type should be invisible if the meaning is not important to show through reading it. But if the text is important than the look of the type than it should be readable. If you can see it there is "invisible" text in the background just dark enough that is gives off the meaning of being invisible while still being seen.