Visual Design articles

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....

Once upon a time in the long lost world of the 1997 (more or less), a little boy was growing up watching Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, and Xena: Warrior Princess on the weekends. He got a Hotmail account because all of his siblings had one; but he didn’t really know anyone else who had email. Still, the spark was struck, and his interest in the Internet was born. Around the same time, GoDaddy was born; born into a world of wondrous possibility,...

By most terms of reference, 70 years is a long time…70 years ago, copywriter David Ogilvy decided to part ways with his former business partner, Edmund Mather; together, they had made up what was known as Ogilvy & Mather. This decision meant moving from London, where the company originated, to Manhattan, where the name of the company would change to just Ogilvy. Now, as of June 2018, Ogilvy has announced a complete rebranding. For a company...

After years of flat, material and completely minimal styles, the gradient has made a comeback. Everywhere you look, designers are using color fades to add visual interest, create user engagement and just design something that’s worth looking at. If you aren’t a fan of gradients, maybe it’s time to rethink your stance on the issue. To help convince you, we’ve got 10 reasons to love and use gradients in your website design projects this...

Come one, come all! There are new(ish) top level domains for sale, and we’re here to tell you all about them! Okay, for the uninitiated, top level domains are basically those little bits at the end of a website’s home address. You know, “.com”, “.org”, “.net”, etc. If you have a website, you could be paying anywhere from $15 to $10,000 USD a year for one, depending on how popular the keywords are. Well now there are a bunch of new...