Visual Design articles

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...

Every December the color categorizing company Pantone nominates one of its colors as a hue for the next 12 months. The act is intended to create positivity around messages such as the environment, gender equality, and current affairs. But the color for 2019 has raised hackles in some quarters. 2019’s official color is named Living Coral, and it’s a nice idealized shade of red coral under blue water. The controversy, according to Jack and...

There were few logos more recognizable than Slack’s. In the five years since the messaging service gained traction it has become a staple on desktops—as much a part of many professionals’ daily routine as email once was—and has grown to an $8bn valuation. So it’s entirely understandable that when Slack revealed its new logo this week, there was a knee-jerk reaction from the design community. No matter how much they might protest,...

If any single tech company embodies the spirit of web-savvy, then it is Mailchimp. Since its beginnings as a side-project in the early-2000s the marketing service has walked the line between creative experiences, and simple usability. Mailchimp is one of those companies that saunters onto the court, lobs a shot over its shoulder, and gets nothing but net. Now, with their latest rebrand courtesy of brand agency Collins (as ever, alongside...

A little less than three years ago, Uber rebranded as the cab-service of choice for dystopian sci-fi pac-man fans. It was a move reportedly intended to recast the startup as the choice of every day people; it actually stripped the brand of all personal connections. This week, a little less than three years longer than it should have waited, Uber have unveiled a far more coherent, far more appealing identity. Designed by the “Uber Brand Experience”...

Hey guys, remember Firefox? Remember the Mozilla Application Suite? That second one isn’t relevant, but everyone knows that nostalgia is an attention-grabber. Now that you’re here, let’s move on with that first item: Firefox. It’s getting a logo change… eventually. The Mozilla foundation wants your help deciding which direction to go. The Firefox logo as we know it was a collaboration by Daniel Burka, Stephen Desroches, and...

Data visualization has quickly become a standard for disseminating information on the web. It’s used across a range of industries, from business intelligence to journalism, to help us understand and communicate the insights within data. Our brains are primed to process information that’s presented visually, making it much easier for us to understand data visualized in charts and graphs than data listed in tables and spreadsheets....