A colleague asked me if there is anything I always do when I approach a project. Initially I really wasn’t sure what to say. After some thought the closest I could get to an answer was this: I am always looking for – and at – structure. Before any project begins you have to find its potential structure. That will allow you to build it… or reveal it.
These are the major iterations in the development of a logo I have been working on with HappyBlad. Don’t worry – there were some smaller steps too.
No matter how new the medium we still tell stories using familiar principles, components & references: iOS7 is set in Helvetica Neu designed in 1983, the hierarchy of The Guardian app echoes that of the print, Instagram evokes a passed most of its users didn’t experience, a photo always has a crop and a colour, Responsive design uses movable type – you can’t get more heritage than Gutenberg. More on this at a later date.
Amazing illustration this week about the importance of the crop. The crop has seen a lot of changes over the past decade. The demands of working on multiple platforms and copy rich print pages has created a new kind of kind of frame that is often infinitely extendable. It’s a world away from Harold Evans “Pictures on a Page”. The subtleties are pretty much gone as we fit densely packed copy in and around the image that – generally – will not have been given much thought. On shoots I pretty much have explain that the crop is dead again and again.
Not for the first time in the past 5 years I found myself sorting through an immense collection of books. Every time I have done this I feel I am somehow facing the issues of print in a more real way than in some article in a design mag/newspaper/blog written by someone a bit like myself trying to explain how their insight is the route to your understanding of where we are now with print, digital, etc, ad nauseum.
ideas/forms/functions 