Typography & Graphic Design Blog
“Whatever you’ve gained is a gift you can give back. If you don’t feel safe being yourself, the gift can’t be shared with us. If you don’t explore yourself, you can’t share with us” – Ashley Ford
Watch Ashley’s Inspiring talk at 99U, learn why being you is so important, as well as the need to nurture the superpower of your imagination.
Ashley C. Ford is an educator, podcaster, and writer from Brooklyn. She has been named named among Forbes Magazine‘s 30 Under 30 in Media (2017)
Elicia Edijanto combines nature and adventure capturing a child like innocence in these whimsical black and white watercolor pieces. View more on her Instagram.
Beautiful work worth sharing. Susanna Bauer creates these works of art from sticks, leaves and pieces of wood together with crochet woven ornately and with delicate balance.
There is a fine balance in my work between fragility and strength; literally, when it comes to pulling a fine thread through a brittle leaf or thin dry piece of wood, but also in a wider context – the tenderness and tension in human connections, the transient yet enduring beauty of nature that can be found in the smallest detail, vulnerability and resilience that could be transferred to nature as a whole or the stories of individual beings.
You can find more of Bauer’s works on her website and Instagram.
Could the key to creativity be multitasking in slow-motion? Not only are successful people found multi-tasking several projects at once, they’ve also found time for hobbies. Studies reveal how mixing it up can be surprisingly beneficial and can help us sharpen our senses and change perspectives.
What can we learn from the world’s most enduringly creative people? They “slow-motion multitask,” actively juggling multiple projects and moving between topics as the mood strikes — without feeling hurried. Author Tim Harford shares how innovators like Einstein, Darwin, Twyla Tharp and Michael Crichton found their inspiration and productivity through cross-training their minds.
Just a little reminder…
Read Design Culture for an insightful interview with Vignelli; his story and thoughts on design, type and advice to budding designers.
This made me laugh. People are great…
Zebrapets asked our team at Robin Design Studio to create a visual language, concepts, packaging and identity for their brand. The goal was to introduce the new pet brand to the German market in a fresh, bold and minimalist way. We used two basic main colours: black & white, because there is a serious colour-chaos in the shelves of the pet shops (and we all know the Von Restorff Effect).
How do you get creative? Writer Madeleine Englis at Thrive Global says “start acting like a beginner, a child….”
What happens when we remove our narrow definition of creativity, and accept that we are all inherently creative?
We will come to see that tapping into creativity equates to harnessing our power to create, rather than to imitate. That is it! How that shows up for you is up to you. You could build something with your hands. You could list out 10 really bad ideas, but hey, they are original and they are your creative ideas. Who cares. It’s a muscle. You need to stop being a victim of creative perfectionism and start acting like a beginner, a child. That is the first step, to leading a creative life. Read On…
Creating a minimalist white coffee shop in Hong Kong is sheer genius from a marketing stand point. NOC is a popular coffee shop that aspires “to remove distractions, so you can connect with the things that matter.”
Brilliant Design and Branding by SuperUnion
Hong Kong is all about more. NOC is a coffee company that believes in less. Less of what you don’t need or never asked for. Less irrelevant choice. Less cutting corners.
In a world that is obsessed with more, NOC decided to put a stake in the ground for believing in less. Nobody needs dozens of types of flat white – all you need is a good one. We created a coffee experience to give a moment of calm amid the chaos of a busy city.
What artist wouldn’t love this job? New York based studio, Obvious State combined their love of books with their talent for illustration. Now partnering with Boxcar Press, they’re able to produce high quality prints on letterpress. Lovely!
The Bibliophilia collection is inspired by an obsession with the underlined passages in our favorite books. Snippets of text from authors, philosophers and thinkers are used as a springboard for a new idea and illustration.
Austin Kleon’s little, yet powerful book, Keep Going, is making the rounds, and I can see why. It’s clever, inspiring, and full of insights from artists who’ve battled long and hard in the unknown territories of themselves. He says, “to change is to be alive.” And yet, culture is harsh with those who are struggling upstream, vouching it’s weak to change your mind, or defend your current view points till death. But, nothing alive is stagnant, and the inability to bend is to be dead in the water.
Kleon writes:
When was the last time you changed your mind about something? We’re afraid of changing our minds we’re afraid of the consequences of changing our minds. What will people think?
…Uncertainty is the very thing that art thrives on. The writer Donald Barthelme said that the artist’s natural state is one of not-knowing”
…You start each work not knowing exactly where you’re going or where you’ll end up. “Art is the highest form of hope,” said painter Gerhard Richter. But hope is not about knowing how things will turn out –it is moving forward in the face of uncertainty. It’s a way of dealing with uncertainty. “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,” write Rebecca Solnit. To have hope, you must acknowledge that you don’t know everything and you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the only way to keep gong and the only way to keep making art: to be open to possibility and allow yourself to be changed.”
Paula Scher, designer of the Citibank logo, takes us on a journey of her career pointing out that her greatest successes came when she was having fun and taking risks. She noticed her work became “solemn” after gaining notoriety and consequently being obliged to keep up certain expectations. She shares the secrets to her greatest design, and encourages designers to gamble, play, and enjoy the ride.
My work is play, and I play when I design. – Paula Scher
Here’s a beautiful book about living in the present moment by illustrator, Coralie Bickford-Smith. Coralie is a U.K. based Designer who loves working with patterns and bold colors, primarily creating book covers for Penguin press.
About her own book she writes,
This is a fable about being in the moment and how the smallest encounters in the day are often the most beautiful. I can be guilty of ignoring these tiny beautiful slices of time because I am too busy getting on with the next task. And like the worm in the story I need to remember to stop, look and cherish these moments. This book is a timely reminder to enjoy the wonders of the world around us.
Gorgeous … Bickford-Smith’s life-affirming artwork raises The Worm and the Bird to the stars – The Times
Absolutely stunning. A very sweet story with a touch of dark humour too. Wonderful. A fantastic book. – Chris Haughton, author of ‘A Bit Lost’
I love love love it, just beautiful. – Millie Marotta, author of ‘Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom’
I love it. A book to buy and treasure, for yourself or others. – Marion Deuchars, author of ‘Let’s Make Some Great Art’ and ‘Colour’
You can buy copy of The Worm and the Bird here. For more of Bickford-Smith’s inspiring illustration and book design, visit her website.
We’re inspired by the work of Studio Barn, out of Istanbul. They’ve created especially beautiful branding for the Artisan Bread Makers, Mitte Brot.
The vintage inspired logotype and hand illustrated rooster, a significant symbol for time and dawn, became the backbone for the branding and different print materials.
A good reminder for those of us who still think too much and drown out the creative voice within…..
The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. The reasoners resemble spiders, who make cob-webs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. – Francis Bacon
Cara Enteles, Bee Polinating Apple Blossom, 2017
And, a bit less poetically, Guy Claxton writes about a study of creativity in “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind”:
The study of creativity in many different areas shows that what is required for optimal cognition is a fluid balance between modes of mind that are effortful, purposeful, detailed and explicit on the one hand, and those that are playful, patient and implicit on the other. We need to be able both to generate ideas, and also to evaluate them. Intuition is the primary mode of generation. D-mode [deliberating mind] is the primary mode of evaluation.
From an excerpt by English poet Alfred Edward Housman as he articulates his creative process using a balanced mix of intuitive and conscious effort (applicable to all artists, of course…):
Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon… I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with a sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form part of…When I got home I wrote them down, leaving gaps, and hoping that for their inspiration might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my walks in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure. I happen to remember distinctly the genius of the piece which stands last in my first volume. Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between Spaniards Inn and the footpath of Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, that was a laborious business. I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right.
As creatives, it often seems we try and forcefully recapture creativity or an idea when faced with the famous white canvas or blank screen. Maybe it’s during these times that we get off our duffs and go for a thoughtless stroll, or make a tea and play with the cat in order to allow something deeper than the intellect to percolate and bubble up in its own time.
Really like modernist abstract pen and ink…this should be a fantastic exhibit. If you’re in or near Boston, make time to visit The Museum of Fine Arts. “Radical Geometries, Bauhaus Prints, 1919–33” will be on display until June 23, 02019.
Celebrate the centenary of this groundbreaking school of modernist abstraction. The Bauhaus—Germany’s legendary school of art, architecture, and design—was founded in Weimar by architect Walter Gropius in the spring of 1919…
“Radical Geometries” marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus with a group of more than 60 works on paper, primarily prints but also a number of drawings, photographs, and ten of the 20 postcards designed by faculty and students for the first Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar in 1923.
