Sonics

LogoLounge 2023: Sonics

Imagine standing there minding your own business and entirely without warning, something slams smack into you at Mach 1 speed. That’s the speed of sound and you’re still able to survive. Sound hits us at 761 mph every moment of our lives yet those crucial sound waves are invisible to us until we give them that second thought. They can communicate, educate, fascinate, irritate, obliterate and just about all of those other -ates. But we can’t see them so when we try to demonstrate sound in a visible manner we tend to fall back on sine waves or the bars from an audio equalizer. These are all nice but still not what sound looks like. It’s merely a measurement of sound via a mathematical equation. (That tends to pull all the feel good out of a song.)

Leaning heavily toward these measuring devices appears to be the pathway for this trend. Considering the increasing role sound plays in marketing it’s no surprise designers are enlisting new ways of representation. Multiple whipping sine waves in fine line form are everywhere this year from logos to supporting fields of brand pattern. Scalability is still challenging but filling in the zone between wave lines is providing enough surface acreage for many of these to overcome that obstacle. Equalizer bars are rampant as well, and though not new they continue to manifest in new iterations. It’s reality that we cling to cliches because consumers can relate. Surely a fresh visual interpretation is only steps away but as they say, it’s tough to make the invisible visible!