Perhaps the most famous face in the art world, the Mona Lisa has kept crowds from all corners of the world visiting the Musee du Louvre, Paris, since she first went on permanent public display.  Leonardo Davinci’s subject, Lisa Gherardini – wealthy Florence silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo’s wife – has been the intrigue of swarming voyeurists fascinated by her ambiguous smile; her expression described as enigmatic.

Considered the prototype of the renaissance portrait, La Gioconda has become a popular subject for caricature.   The internet is full of ideas of how the Mona Lisa would have been depicted by artists of our time.

Picasso

Matt Groening (The Simpsons)

Roy Lichtenstein

Andy Warhol Pop Art

The Prado in Madrid is now boasting to have unearthed a copy of the Mona Lisa by one of Davinci’s pupils, whom produced the work by his side.  Currently being restored to its former glory, fans of the beauty which was painted in 1503, will soon have more insight into her true appearance.  Having been discovered under black over paint, the fresher version of the captivating women can be seen with greater detail than the Mona Lisa in the Louvre which has several layers of old, cracked varnish.

The Guardian newspaper published an interactive comparative of both paintings on the 1^st of February 2012.

1. Capture the Identity of the Business

If you’re designing a logo for an organization, then you should already know exactly what they represent. Don’t forget this essential aspect of the design process.

2. Master the Art of Complex Simplicity

An elaborate design with detailed borders and a name that fades into an obscure background may be a wonderful work to view, but it won’t make your logo design easy to remember. Complex works eventually become indistinguishable from each another. Likewise, a logo that simply states the business name in a standard font is also unlikely to create an impression. When your logo is cluttered, it runs viewers away. A good logo is like a catchy tune, viewers should get the image stuck in their head. The best logo designers know how to add the appropriate amount of pizzazz to a simple idea. Amazing designs are also memorable designs.

3. Make Good Use of Your Color Palette

Color is the part of the logo that grabs a viewer’s attention first. A memorable logo only requires a few colors. Complementary colors are naturally appealing. Colors that are not complementary can still be effective within a logo design if they are used wisely and skillfully. When bright colors are used appropriately, they can heighten visibility and launch a logo into a viewer’s long term memory. Don’t just select colors that you happen to like.  Always remember to think carefully about which colors will create an accurate representation of the company.

4. Consider the Logo’s Purpose and Location

Always contemplate your logo’s purpose and location as you begin the design process. If your logo will be seen on a billboard, then take into consideration the time viewers will have to process the imagery and make a connection to the company you’re representing. You should be able to recognize roadside designs very quickly. Viewers cannot remember a convoluted logo in a short amount of time. If you are creating a logo design for small scale printing, then remember that your logo design should stand out without taking over.

5. Make the Name Stick

Businesses go to great lengths to protect their name and identity. Don’t forget how important a company’s name is when you create your design. Skilled designers love to get fancy with type. However, don’t fall into the trap of making a business name twist and turn all of over the logo. The name should be easy to read and remember.

Designers have an important job, don’t we? We create the branding that determines the very identity of virtually every kind of company. If you keep these five fundamental characteristics in mind, you will be on your way to creating an excellent logo design for your next client.

Brief your logo requirements now!

Kathleen

It is refreshing to see designers returning to more traditional methods in a digitally saturated market. There’s a sense of calm reality when we see design made without the use of a computer. 

One such designer is multi disciplined creative extraordinaire Peter Dahmen, a graphic designer from Germany with a flare for all things paper craft. Specializing in pop up sculptures his work tends to be designed as single, unique pieces utilising great attention to detail to create a masterpiece. What is particularly interesting about his works are the realism and detail of each construction and how visually mesmerizing each hand made object is as it opens and moves.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuQsxFhBGzw

Some of our favorites are his architectural pieces all constructed from Paper. He does give a few hints on how he creates the pieces, but most of the secrets of his magic are closely guarded.  We spoke to him about his method, and about how long each paper project took.  He said that to construct a pop up card with a 3d model of a tree, for instance, would take about 2-3 weeks at least.  There is a lot of trial and error involved in each piece, and a lot of meticulous measuring.  

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGPIOz1QMEo

Some of his clients do ask for one-off pieces of paper-engineered artwork, but most would probably want a mass run of the final output.  Makes sense really.

After working on a prototype for a few weeks, the final measurement can be repeated over and over again. 

Hope you’re inspired by this – why not submit your own brief for awe-inspiring design?

Paper Boat Creative

With the majority of retailers now seeing the benefits of expanding into the mobile channel, an app can provide a substantial boost to a mobile marketing campaign. However, without an effective design, the popularity of the app is doomed before it has been launched

One of the most enticing qualities of a mobile app is that it enables companies to engage with a much larger audience. With the majority of the developed world now using smartphones on a daily basis, particular the operating systems of Android and Apple devices, the opportunity to reach a huge customer base has never been easier. By offering customers the option of interacting with the company via their mobile, it makes the user feel more involved with the brand and therefore more likely to make a purchase.

Ideally retailers want the app to be retained on customer’s smart phones, to be used repeatedly. The only way of doing this is by the aforementioned good user experience design. Apps should not only be slick and appeal visually, although this is a major part of encouraging the initial download. The app should also be easy to use and fully functional, with menu systems designed for use with thumbs rather than mouse clicks. New web standards HTML5, CSS3 and Jquery allow for more content rich experiences, such as suggested product feeds, videos and drag-and-drop shopping baskets, to name a few. 

Naturally though, the only real reason a retailer will invest in an app will be to increase revenue through m-commerce. 

Another reason for retailers to expand into the mobile channel is the chance to maximise conversions. With an app that is specifically built to appeal to customers and encourage customers to shop, retailers should see more customers follow through on a purchase than if they were standing alone in an aisle at a store or browsing a website. In many ways, an app acts as the most seasoned salesperson on the floor. It can provide thorough amounts of information and ask directly for the sale, offering a quick and easy way for the customer to finish the transaction and move along with their day.

One final benefit for retailers to utilise the mobile channel is the ability for them to enhance their public perception. A retailer that offers a slick mobile app can be seen as “cool” by the public. They will be viewed as a company that is in touch with its audience. Retail companies should embrace the fact that mobile marketing, specifically their app, is a large part of their overall marketing scheme. A well-built app is necessary to maintain a company’s image and keep customers wanting to do business with them.

With all of these benefits in mind, the best practice for designing a mobile retail app is to work from the ground up. The designers should work heavily with those in charge of merchandising as well as mobile marketing, in order to get a firm grasp on what the company needs to succeed. Once this is understood, designing a retail app will be a fairly intuitive process for most. So long as it is well-programmed and offers an interface that is easy to navigate and caters to the same audience as the store, a retail app can be a terrific success. As the mobile segment develops further, more emphasis will be placed on retailers’ apps as a source of sales. For this reason, retailers should expand into the mobile channel now with a clear strategy for success.

This is a guest post from James Bentham, off-page SEO Executive at Search Laboratory.

The ad finds a man waking up and follows him as he catches helium balloons floating around town, emblazoned with the logos of Freeview’s most popular channels. He races through streets collecting more balloons, but looks puzzled – maybe because he hasn’t had his morning coffee yet. Finally, he floats away, lifted by his balloons, and we zoom out to see others floating around with their bunches of balloons. This is the sort of ad that is made by its soundtrack, and here we have a perfect match in The Turtles’ Happy Together.  

Based on a surreal concept, the success of the ad is in its soft execution, so relaxed that it makes his journey seem almost normal. Its soft tones and easy styling give the commercial a homely feel, making it easy to digest and – unlike so many ads – enjoyable to watch again and again.

We look forward to seeing more in this series. And, even if you don’t have the sort of budget that this ad has swallowed, you could still get an ad that will fly for you from 13,500 world-class creatives and agencies. Brief the Exchange now!

Our relationship with color goes way back, and it changes over time. Did you know blue was for girls and pink was for boys until about 100 years ago? Pink was considered a stronger colour whilst blue was considered daintier, and was associated with the Virgin Mary, and therefore perceived as more appropriate for girls.

Color is so important in communicating your brand that companies have even trade marked their signature colours. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with it’s famous purple, Heinz’s baked bean turquoise. Apple demonstrated how important colour can be in changing a brand’s perception, first by bringing our their iMacs in delicious colours, now seen on the multitude of iPods now glowing in the temples that are the apple stores. Research by the Institute for Colour Research revealed that people make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone. 

So, color is important, but why is this? Color enables recognition and memory, attracts attention and acts as a visual aid to guide the eye around a page. One of the biggest and the most fundamental reason though is that it evokes emotion, and weather you like it or not, our decisions are made based mainly as a result of our emotional reactions, not logic. After carrying out a study proving this at University College London, Bernedetto De Martino commented “the brain stores emotional memories of past decisions, and those are what drive people’s choices in life.”

Our emotional reactions are closely connected to our experiences – our childhood memories of candyfloss, the seaside, the yellow-tinted hues of old photographs, these color palettes transport us to a different place. Some of these associations we share collectively, and some are individual to our own experience. Therefore associations change depending on where you had those experience and any color languages you have been taught through your culture. For example red can mean danger, passion, purity, death, mourning, vitality, and marriage, depending on where you’re from. This is a great summary of color and meanings across continents that provides a really useful guide.

Age and gender make a difference too, according to a report by Leslie Harrington PhD and Anat Lechner PhD, younger people see orange as more peaceful, and older people associate more positive emotions with red and purple. Red, yellow and orange were seen more negatively by men, whilst black was viewed more positively. The report doesn’t speculate as to why this might be, and it seems like no one really knows, but in my view the most likely reason is that it’s a mixture of context and experience.

As no one really knows why we feel why we do about color, my advice would be to focus on context. What do you want your audience to feel? This should be heavily linked to your brand strategy. When I’m developing a brand story for a new company, we pick 3 emotions we want to evoke in our audience; this should drive the color choice. When we’re talking about color, I try to make connections with things in the real world that make me feel how I want the audience to feel, and let this lead the palette. For example, we all know natural colors are calming, and this is because they bring our minds back to simple things that have been around for eternity and will still be here, relatively unchanged after we’ve gone. They bring back the perspective to our lives, which is very therapeutic. So if I want to evoke these emotions in my audience, this is where I’ll look. I love design-seeds.com for this because it takes reference from nature and man-made found objects, and pulls beautiful harmonious colour palettes out of them.

Altering reality

Color can be used to completely distort perspective, as is fantastically demonstrated in the work of Felice Varini, who paints geometric shapes onto spaces that change your perception of the space and the object painted within it, depending on where you view it from.

By manipulating the rods and cones in your eyes, you can use the after image effect, (the visual distortion you get when you stare at one solid colou=r then look at a white wall and you see the opposite color on the colour wheel). The Lilac Chaser demonstrates this very well whilst also adding motion into the equation, making colors completely disappear. This video on New Scientist shows another way you can trick the brain using colour and motion, this won the best illusion of the year contest .

So as designers, there’s obviously a lot to think about when picking your colours for your next project, and a huge amount of opportunity to manipulate reality! There are some excellent places now online that can help you with this process, for example, the aforementioned design-seeds.com, colourscheme.com, colourlovers.com has loads of tools, you can even upload a photo and their photocopa software will pull out a colour palette from it. Pinterest.com lets you create visual mood-boards in a really intuitive way, providing an easy way to build a color board online that’s shareable. There are thousands of places and people predicting the colour trends based on all sorts of factors, from the economy, human behavior and crowd-sourced trend-spotting, but one place to have a look at some free color trend info is here: and if you want to try your hand at injecting some illusion into your work, colourlovers has some good inspiration.

If you want to read more about color there’s a great reading list on the colour association website. And if you want to ensure your next design project is color-perfect then brief now!

Hope you have a colourful and inspiring day!

Ruth

As designers we should be an approachable mentor, and always explain our processes to the client no matter how many times we may have been over the same points previously.  You can imagine it’s no fun being patronized when you are asking others about a particular service, and the sales person rolls their eyes thinking your questions are lame and irritating.  It will make you feel annoyed and will make you feel that the service isn’t very professional.

Don’t expect clients to know what runs through your head, and don’t expect them to immediately understand how very important design is for their business. Explain it to them in a way that makes them feel empowered to work with you.  Yes this will take up more of your time but it will be well worth it.

Perhaps the most straightforward yet challenging point to consider when branding is to define who the client is currently and what they want to be. No waffle, no fancy visual solutions, just a clear statement that you and your client can communicate with clarity. ‘This is who we are and this is what we do’. Be patient with your client and get their story straight before you dive in.

Good design starts with good education. Good luck! 

Perhaps one of our favorite projects showcased within the listings is London based studios Anomaly and Unit9′s ‘One thousand cranes for Japan’. By collating a variety of patterns donated by artists, users can download and create origami cranes in exchange for a donation to disaster relief Japan.

Designs of the Year exhibits from February 8 and runs until July 15 whilst the category award winners and overall winners of the Design of the Year Award 2012 will be announced at an awards event in April.

Could your next design project be an award-winner? Brief now!

This is Fabien Barral’s 2012 Limited Edition letterpress calendar, a rerun from his very successful 2011 edition.  Why is it so amazing? Well, more than the beautiful highly illustrated black and white typography style displayed each month, the value lies in the fact that it is reminiscent of traditional graphic design.  

Here’s a quick lesson for you techy digital designers who have forgotten about arcane objects like stamps, pens and pencils. Letterpress, basically put, is when cut out blocks like linoleum, wood or zinc are etched with a design,  inked,  and then stamped on to another surface like paper.  The machines to press the ink-laced blocks can be big and heavy, but the principle of stamp-art on a large scale is probably the best way to understand it.

Back to Fabien. His hard work and his fusion of 15^th century graphic design with modern graphic design is remarkable.  Being able to almost feel and imagine the time and effort put behind each print is well worth the buy. Best of all, it’s all done on 100% recycled paper. 

Whatever your desire for cool design, it can be fulfilled at the Creative Services Exchange. Brief now!