Empty

For those of you who don't know there is a great design magazine around called Empty, I have only looked over the one issue but I'm assuming they are all as good as another. This particular issue, that I am doing my essay on, is full of amazing artworks and the "editorial content" basically is just about the artists, not too much bullshit advertising, at least not in the conventional way anyway.

This piece of design, is a perfect example I think of less is more, on the last page of this magazine there is just this, "Now Go Create, EMPTY". I feel it's the comparison to the rest of the magazine's wealth in flavour of detail and colour to the lack of, that makes you want to fill that space, cleverly emphasizing the point that the text is making while refering you back to the magazine's title.

The position of the text seems to be suggestively leading out of the back cover almost as if for you to fill more space with your creativity. I wish I knew more about fonts so I could crap on some more but all I can say is I like the typograpghy and it's quite obviously complimented by the white background. I like looking at the pictures in this mag, cheers for the lend Ellie.

Pre-emptive

I think everyone remembers seeing this on our excursion, the logo that they had on the wall was a lot better using 3D design with bits of metal stuff coming from the wall instead of the red line work, looked kind of spidery and was the second most interesting thing next to that really enthusiastic guy at the advertiser.

It took me until now when I've been stuck with ideas to blog about, to remember this logo but I like it's use of simplicity. It only uses three colours and the white text is complimented by the background.

It uses clean geometric shapes and line work for the main part of the logo and would appear almost off balance if it weren't for sharp ordered lines of text giving a sense of harmony. You could almost see in this design two halves or parts of a business, one being the creative side the other being the professional side, working together, this is the impression I fell this logo gives.

SOAD

This is a print from my Sytem Of A Down jacket. I freakin love this design, firstly because of it's exaggerated cartoon style, the fact that the band shown is one of my favourites, but mostly for the random factor. This design shows the four band members Serj, Daron, Shavo and John riding an elephant and a bunch of mushrooms some of which are on pogo sticks, thats just crazy.

The colours used are just reds greys and touches of black. The red border does well to emphasize the design especially so by contrast of the surface it's printed on and the more pale shades of grey. The imagery somewhat overlaps the border which is partly deteriorated gives the impression that it's crumbling away and the band is breaking away coming at you.

James Squire

This is a picture I took of a coaster at the James Squire Brewhouse on Sydney's King Street Warf, probably the second best place I have been to drink beer so far next to the Duckstein in Margaret River, freakin magical place.

The design on this coaster is pretty much type based using it to make up the picture. The name, "Golden Ale" representing the head of the beer, the flavour notes express the body of the beer and the word beer illustrates the base of the glass. The traditional James Squire hand written style of type is used for the brands name which gives an authentic feel.

The sections of white in the type and bordering the bottom compliment the dark background and emphasize the other colours. Amber and and orange cleverly illustrate the effect of light shining trough like with an actual glass of Golden Ale, this part of the colour scheme is probably what does it for me.

By this point you're probably thinking " #*@^ how many times is he going to blog about beer", but beer takes up a majority of my time and thought so, yeah. I myself don't particularly love this beer but the design is well cool.

The Red

I got this design from the Threadless Tees newsletter its called "The Red". Threadless Tees is an American based internet store out of Chicago that promotes and sells people's designs and is known worldwide.

This print uses no typography, It depicts a "Little Red Riding Hood" figure with quite violent suggestive elements but still with an innocence about it think, an almost Macabre style.

It's colour scheme is very simple using only red with touches of black and white which do very well to compliment each other. The chalky white bringing out the blood stained background which uses the shirts colour, red, to involve the whole shirt's body with design.

It's dark and bloody so I love it.

Heineken Billboard

Found this Heineken billboard while looking for another one I saw in Sydney that said "not something you can blog about", which I thought would be ironic but I couldn't find it so I settled for this one.

I like how this design seems to be being sucked in by the resident of one of the rooms like he or she realy loves Heineken. Apart from that, the advertisement is pretty basic using a monochromatic colour scheme like pretty much all Heineken advertisements do. The font is traditional to the product as well, although I'm not sure what that font is called.

I think this is a pretty original and cool way of advertising and thats why I like this design.

MSI Album Cover

This the cover for the Japanese version of the MSI album "IF" full length, found it while cruisin the net as you do and got this particular picture of from the designer's blog.

Being the Japanese album cover it seems to have a Japanese style of design with an extreme twist. It uses bold fluerecent colours that would normaly clash and with the chaotic imagery it's very disordered but somehow all works realy well together.

The only form of typography used is some form of Japenese I assume says "IF" but is just as likely to say some realy dirty word. The writing using darker colour and a 3D rendering as oposed to the rest of the design which looks 2D and bright colours, stands out over the rest like a title should.

I like this design because it's bold and very very different.