Throwing shade on a designer’s work is as toothless as a heckler to a seasoned comedian. Show five logos and one gets picked. At best we have an 80% rejection rate. No doubt the seeds that make us so resilient and inventive. Tiring of the expected, this year our lot has crafted a new way to throw shade on their own work. That desire to eschew another field of gradient color for tone or a barrage of diminishing strokes to signal motion have given way to a concentric string of hyper-effective dots and dashes. Welcome a pleasant new way to break the visual tension of traditional shading while providing a pure vector solution.
Over the last several years, we’ve seen dots and dashes with rounded extremities mingling together to demonstrate the melding of diverse elements. Usually running concentric or parallel to each other and not merging or emerging from a solid field. By extruding these out of a field or bridging these elements together and extending them out of an object, designers are presenting the consumer with the dot-dot-dot invitation they need to complete the picture in their own mind. A couple of dots in the CoffeeSwap cup and I get it. So you drop out the tail end of the speedy rabbit. ‘Nuff said.