Design articles

From 45,000-year-old cave paintings to 21st-century space rocket diagrams, illustrations have long played a significant role in human communication. Pictures cross-language and literacy barriers, allowing people to understand and communicate complex moods and feelings that they cannot in words. When we were little, we could understand and appreciate E.H. Shepard’s illustrations of Winnie the Pooh and friends long before we could...

What makes a company special? There are hundreds of organizations out there selling fast food, but only one McDonalds. You’ve probably stumbled across dozens of technology companies too, but none of them inspire the same kind of loyalty and commitment as Apple. So why do people fall in love with some companies more than others? Most of the time, it comes down to one thing: brand essence. Your brand essence, or brand identity, represents all...

Have you ever wondered why we’re so amazed by motion? A moving image is more likely to grab your attention than a static one. Motion is exciting and attention-grabbing – plus, it allows us to access more information in a short space of time.  For a while now, companies have been experimenting with all kinds of motion and animation in their design choices. We’ve seen the rise of animated website backgrounds or live-playing videos instead...

Web design is an ever-evolving field. Those of us that have been in the industry a long time (i.e., six months plus) have seen the launch of more products, the establishment of more ideas, and the promise of more growth than most industries see over a whole career. While the tools we use, the terminology we employ, and the goalposts we shoot for are constantly changing, core skills are transferable and long-lasting and will ensure you not only...

Typography is one of the most important elements of any site, having a measurably large impact on brand and experience. So fundamental is it that making wholesale changes to your typography — opting for a new font, changing the measure, increasing leading — is complex and fraught with potential time-sinks. But there are some simple changes that you can make to your typography that won’t break your grid and can be achieved in 30 minutes...

The Beazley Design of the Year for 2020 has just been awarded to US architecture firm Rael San Fratello & Colectivo Chopeke for their Teeter-Totter Wall project, a series of luminous pink seesaws built into the US-Mexico border wall in July 2019. The 74 shortlisted entrants for the prize range from a poster for vegan burgers to a parody of Pantone’s Color of the Year. Most were self-consciously political. As design has grown in stature,...

Burger King, the globally recognized food chain with 19,000 restaurants worldwide, has unveiled a redesigned set of brand assets. Since the late 1960s, the company has used a logotype sandwiched between two buns. In 1999 the design was updated to add a blue swoosh and some plastic highlights to the bun; Jones Knowles Ritchie’s new design reverts to the classic 1969 approach, with some modern refinements. Left: The 1999 design, Right: JKR’s...

It’s that time again: the self-fulfilling prophecy that is the Pantone Color of the Year has been announced for 2021. For 2021, we’re getting two colors of the year. The colors selected to grace museum gift shops, and end-of-year blog posts are Ultimate Gray (a mid-range gray somewhere around #939597) and Illuminating (a citrus yellow that’s approximately #F5DF4D). A marriage of color conveying a message of strength and hopefulness...

Most of the information we consume happens through reading, so it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to the words when designing. There are many aspects to typography, but one of the things that helped improve the quality of my design was letter-spacing. Letter-spacing is about adding and removing space between letters. Some people confuse it with kerning, but these two are different; letter-spacing affects the whole line of text, whereas...

A successful rebrand goes far beyond flashy graphics and high-res photos. It tells a story. It positions a product to fulfill the wants and needs of the consumer. Following the rebrand journey of Lettuce Grow, take a look at how visual elements can enforce the mission of your brand, engage your consumer and cultivate incredible results. Lettuce Grow introduced a sleek, revolutionary, hydroponic growing system that makes growing food...

Every day in my work helping grow digital agencies and Fortune 500 brands, I hear countless companies struggle with how to discuss, interact with, and grow their client’s brand, leaving dollars on the table and creating problems along the way. The agency owner offers their perspective, shares why branding is important, but usually lacks the conversational skills to navigate the need. And as a result, it’s not just the client that suffers....

I’ve never really enjoyed writing brand guidelines, I always felt it got in the way of the “real” design work i wanted to be doing. But I also really don’t enjoy designing a carefully thought out, beautifully executed logo only to see it used and abused by a poorly informed client. To work on creating a visual identity and then to send it out into the world with the equivalent of a hastily scrawled map on the back of a cigarette packet is woefully...

Minimalism is a trend that has largely defined the best part of the last decade. Its rise to prominence came as a reaction to the abundance of heavy styling which preceded it. It offered a simpler and cleaner design direction for websites and interfaces. Web and app designs became less complex in terms of styling, speeding up development time and resulting in digital products that loaded quicker. As a design direction, minimalism has been around...

Typography is a fundamental part of design, it enables the designer to create a variety of moods and effects by using various font styles. There are thousands of different styles available, so the task of finding the correct one to suit your project can often appear very difficult. There are numerous tools online that offer assistance in selecting the correct font pairings. Here’s one we built ourselves. Using this handy font combination...