How to be good
Key takeaways
Sometimes a client will ask for simple branding, no matter how big or small the budget, as long as it appeals to an audience.
How to run a marathon
Key takeaways
Your first job will make you realise you barely know what you are doing. Then 6 months in you should know roughly what to do, be able to take over the work, sustain the client relationship, and give the best advice.
As a design consultant, we come in from the outside, get our bearings, and give the best advice we can.
We design systems for others to implement and hope and pray they get it right.
Each assignment offers the best kind of challenge: If you could design anything you wanted, what would you do?
How to avoid the obvious
Key takeaways
Graphic designers have a love/hate relationship with clichés. In design school we are taught to create something new. But not entirely new. It should stand out from its competitors, and not be so different that it scares the audience away.
Every graphic design solution must navigate between comfort, cliché, and metaphor.
The antidote to stereotype is experience.
Sometimes avoiding the obvious means embracing it.
How to avoid doomsday
Key takeaways
With a limited budget and timescale, use visual analogy (one symbol) to communicate concisely and clearly.
How to be fashionably timeless
Key takeaways
When a store offers you a design assignment, utilize its history and heritage. It can be timeless and trendy.
Cursive script logos from the 1970's are still popular.
It's possible to redesign an old typeface and give it a modern twist.
Sometimes graphics in an abstract square compositin can be the answer.
Solving a design problem happens slowly, then all at once.
How to cross cultures
Key takeaways
How could you use a cohesive urban design to assert its global presence?
Think about graphic assets, use one element such as a symbol, turn that into a foreign art pattern with varying colours and rotating the element. This unique pattern applied to print, digital, and on a campus can bring cross culture together in a global presence.
Pattern because of its hypnotic repetition, and dazzling chromatic.
Foreign art meaning Islam art, Middle Eastern art, German art, Swiss art , Polish art, etc.
Really look at what makes them look different.
It is vibrant colours? Typefaces? Images? Layout?
How to behave in church
Key takeaways
Organisations seeking an identity often want a logo. But the way you look can be just as important as to what you say, how you say it, and what you do.
Sometimes you have to unravel complex codes and combine modern with old to create a good experience. The contrasting relationship of a contemporary humorous tone of voice set in a historic old typeface form sets a contradictory code.