find & share: packaging

brand: suave

product: men body wash

target audience: men who recognize their own need for washing, and the occasional (or frequent) woman who facilitates the washing of a man.

mode of appeal: ethos by way of dale earnhardt junior's recommendation.

experience audit: i liked the subtle curves of the bottle, and the color seemed appropriate. the colors are certainly the loudest aspect of the current design. the consumer pops open the cap and sniffs it almost immediately. there is factual information to be found on the back, but it is secondary to the front. this looks very similar to most soaps and shampoos for men.

survey says: "well, that guy loves it. and he has nice hair. shampoo. refreshing. blue. men. gradient." (it isn't shampoo.) & "dale earnhardt jr. looks constipated. that's offensive. it says refreshing. it's blue, like they always market to guys. and silver. which they also always market to guys. it's boring. it's suave body wash."

brand: westcott

product: geometry math kit

target audience: moms and dads purchasing school supplies, the kinds of kids who buy their own school supplies.

mode of appeal: ethos by way of teacher recommendation and westcott's age as a company.

experience audit: i was drawn to the foldover package with the snap. this package is noticeably, awfully, bland. the consumer flips it over, and then unsnaps it and experiences the inside as well, pretty rapidly.

survey says: "a plus! it's plain. blue and grey. very dull. it's a geometry math kit with a drop shadow. it lists angles. it's got a ruler and protractor." & "it's informational. it's boring. it's math. it's covered in numbers. it's blue and silver. sterile, scientific. it's a geometry kit. it's got a compass."

brand: whiskas

product: temptations

target audience: cat owners, particularly those who want to treat their cats but don't want their cats to get fat.

mode of appeal: pathos by way of cartoony narrative.

experience audit: this package is very loud with ridiculous looking cartoons on it. the bright yellow with those drawings are quite potent. the consumer flips it over quickly because the front read doesn't take long. neither the front nor back are terribly informative, although they both contain some level of information. these are a little floppy, so you have to be careful to stand it upright.

survey says: "friendly, comic. it's bright. called temptations. there's only one photograph of the treat itself, everything else is illustration. it's crunchy outside and soft inside. it's food, but i don't know for what." & "looks like a dog. the treat is crunchy outside and soft inside. it's yellow, bright, offensive. these are cat treats. it's got speech bubbles or clouds or something. i don't know why. it's by whiskas, it's called temptations."

brand: heaven

product: red devil shorty

target audience: cigar smokers, particularly new, who want a nice cigar but don't want to smoke all of it.

mode of appeal: pathos by way of mythology.

experience audit: this label is beautiful. i'm drawn to the narrative form in the tiny, perfect image. the consumer automatically smells it as soon as they've admired the label. there is no additional information given on the individual cigar. perhaps on the box instead, given that its intended context is in a box with a set of its own, or at least surrounded by other brands of cigars.

survey says: "red squiggly lines, little image that i couldn't quite process. has people. a cigar. it says red devil. cherry something on the bottom." & "it's a cigar i guess? called the red devil or something. very nice little illustration. packaging seems warm and inviting, which is good for a cigar. cherry flavoured? not a lot more experience around it. has the barcode. i wanna open it."

brand: self expressions, a division of maidenform

product: the i-fit bra

target audience: ladies with a bra cup size between an "a" and a "d" who feel that they may need some level of additional padding and lift.

mode of appeal: logos by way of infographic. 

experience audit: the dainty little infographic really drew me into this package on that small pink label. the colors are bright and poppy. the consumer turns it around and holds it to their chest to inspect if/how it might fit. given the bra's shape and hanger, the back of the label doesn't reveal any necessary info. the infograph is somewhat novel but other than that, this fits unnoticeably in with all the other bras and  labels.

survey says: "this looks comfy and soft, it's purple. (n/a.) this is an a-cup, because it's circled. it's got an obnoxious pink 'new self expressions' thing. the tag has a girl in her bra on it." & "it's got a happy girl in a bra. she must be happy because her boobs look nice. the label is pink. it's called i-fit. it's pretty boring. there are diagrams of the padding."

rhetorical find & share

these here are two related designs by mr. a. m. cassandre, from 1935, depicting oceanliners. i thought these used hyperbole really nicely to get across the idea of massiveness. in each ad, the ship is seen from an extremely low angle, as though it were about to run us over. we are necessarily viewing the ships as though we are looking straight up at them, with their taking up the entire skyspace. this exaggeration of space works very well because it helps us understand the grandeur of these crafts as it might be comprehended through our own eyes, rather than seeing the whole thing to scale at a comfortable distance. a critical difference between these two pieces comes in how the secondary elements are used, whether to continue to magnify the size, or to give a different perspective. in l'atlantique, the ship is depicted a second time, much much smaller. this instance shows how, despite the gargantuan size of the ship, it will always be overwhelmed by the immensity of the ocean. in normandie, on the other hand, the second visual element, the almost-microscopic birds, serve to continue to heighten the scale of the normandie, placing it as dominant, even over the ocean.

i can't stop looking at type-motion-graphic-things! there are worse problems.

i started looking for a good find&share for narrative in sound and motion class... so far i've only found several.

consequently, i have also learned lots, because some of these are lovely moving infographics!

these are by the same guy as tyler's example, so i dunno if he counts, but i was pretty mindboggled by this info, and it is, of course, beautiful.



How Green Is Your Internet? from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.
Google "Trying not to be evil" from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

this is some student work from r.i.t., but it had some pretty cute advertise-y narrative in it, too.



Type in Motion Final from Yansong Jiang on Vimeo.

this is another student piece, but i don't think he ever says where he's from. it's a lot less crisp and tidy than the other three i just posted, and has some kind of interesting 3d rendering that i can't really comprehend yet? also, it's tom waits talking.



aaand i really considered putting up the girl effect organization's ads, which are type-heavy motion graphics, but their ties to nike and potential sexism kind of make me nervous, and i haven't really researched them yet to alleviate my doubt, so i'll link but maybe not embed? you can go here to see what i'm talking about.
http://youtu.be/5kxysX4MmOU
http://youtu.be/QnD0Z4WJ5LA

ANYWAY. motion graphics. i'm pretty excited about them.

dvd cover research

inconvenient truth is an example of doing a really awesome combination of images, a swap that makes sense and builds a very clear new meaning about how industry relates to climate change.

don't laugh. the jaws poster/cover has a spectacular use of threat and dramatic irony, with the happy little person completely oblivious to their imminent peril. the tension here is terrific, and a good metaphor for how ignorantly we're just prancing through the world despite our rapidly approaching doom.

this life dvd does a really lovely job of compositing imagery. we understand that these things would never, could never be this close together, but the manipulation is clean and attractive and allows us to suspend our disbelief to accept how diverse the planet's life is.

bbc's planet earth itself, all 11 dvd covers of it. (is this all of them?) i think this is a nice example of how a treatment can be used to unify a lot of very different imagery. by curving the horizon against the darkness of space, we have a really intense push/pull between close photography and the idea of the planet itself, and regardless of the content of the photos, they look like they belong together.

type: find & grid. or grid & share.

i have been finding to share throughout this class period. i have found much! i will share some.

first, though, i'm just going to throw down some cool links to sites i encountered in my traversing. they were very informative and undoubtedly will be helpful in the coming years and thus i thought i might offer them up.

exhibit a: grid based design toolbox, by fuel your creativity. this link alone will give you dozens of related helpful things, examples and tutorials and articles etc.

exhibit b: design by grid dot com. contains more examples and more resources and gallery and such.

exhibit c: designing with a grid based approach, from smashing magazine. more links, interviews, examples. a lot of really great quotes and tips about using grids in design:

The grid is the most vivid manifestation of the will to order in graphic design. [...] Units are the basic building block of a grid. They’re all uniform. Columns are the grouping of units that create the visual structure of the page. They are not necessary uniform. [ Grids are good ]

sometimes i get so caught up in reading things online that i don't know what to do with myself! i want to read everything and learn everything, a feat that becomes exponentially more impossible with every heartbeat, given the speed with which content can be generated.

anyway. i have not read all of those sites and all their links and all the links their links will link to, is what i'm saying. i would like to, but it is exceedingly improbable, particularly during just this class period.

so here's some images i happened upon through my finding:



(if you've reached this parenthetical giving me the benefit of the doubt about whether or not i can read that text, you can take back your doubtful benefit. i definitely can't. sorry to disappoint!)

this magazine page from a july issue of arena magazine uses an extremely simple grid. it was mathematically built in a four column layout, i'm noticing, but it acts like the three column page i initially thought it to be because the textblock is proportional to the man, and also proportional to his shadow, cutting the page into thirds, if with a comfortable margin to the interior. i just found this to be a pretty beautifully composed layout due to the consistency of the columns.

i also found a really exciting walkthrough of how the grid structure of the onion's website functions, which i will summarize and also link to because he explained it all very well.

(if you read this, you can skip the rest of this blog post for redundancy)

basically, the onion (above the fold of the website looks kinda like this, perhaps you've seen it?

evidently that is based, in its absolutely most basic way, on a grid rather like this one:



while they would never in a million years display that many columns of separate content, having it divided this specifically eliminates the confusion over where to align things of a much greater variety of sizes. and then they are able to combine those columns into lots of options of "supercolumns" depending on their needs.



like this, for instance, being a structure on which the homepage is largely built. given that ads are nigh  inescapable on the web, this grid allows for their integration without toooo much frustration, and they live in the spaces marked by black:



for those times they just really need to let us read a lot of text, like searches and archives, there are pages like this: (black still denotes ads)



while for the articles, they have this extremely subtle "cut in half" page which is not cut in half, being 9 & 7 columns on either side of the active gutter, giving the text its necessary attention without slighting the "value-add functionality" and links and such.



so. people use grids! all the time. they are ubiquitous and necessary when we act out of our "will to order." (what a nietzschean design principle.)

now i need to go work on mine more.

more find and share (because i'm not sure if it counts if i use myself)

hembakat är bäst is the title of an ikea cookbook featuring these images by carl kleiner and evelina brattell.

i believe these images to be a good example of unexpected line studies: they use line intervals and weights and complex grid interactions as bases for anything else, and the configuration unifies the disparate objects as well as organizes them in an elegant, visually engaging way.

they did have a slightly more straightforward time of it, though, with the luxury of building their photographs as they wanted them to appear rather than trying to find something that matches from preexisting arrangements.

trying to apply the things i'm learning!

as the communications officer for student assembly, i'm responsible for generating the signage and posters for our events. for this student forum poster, i used one of mckenzie's/my simple random line compositions in which to set my text! i also left some of the lines as additional graphic elements to add interest. i'm not certain it could stand up to a rigorous critique, but as a quick eye-grabbing informational bulletin, i think it's pretty okay.

(plus, i've got this neat optical illusory trick where it doesn't look like it's squared with 90 degree corners!)