Tag: bill gardner

There are more than enough idioms in our language that lambast the individual that can’t spot the obvious: They can’t see the forest for the trees; Couldn’t see it if it hit you; Hidden in plain sight; or a personal favorite, Can’t see a hole in a ladder. Though questioning a designer’s perspective can be […]

Mazes and their inception have always puzzled me. In classical times, I can imagine them being laid out and pruned within an inch of their life to amuse the owner of some well-healed estate. On the other hand, I can see that they could have been a way for the elite to dispose of boorish […]

Humans have a desire to achieve a level of balance and harmony. We like to create order. As a rule, order can give us a sense of wellbeing. This is all part of a much bigger psychological conversation associated with the Gestalt theory, but for the purpose of this trend it’s driven by our comfort […]

Sometimes an aesthetic meets it demise and no one remembered to tell it. A bit like my feelings for designs that trod out the old circuit board solder pathways careening around like a pair of Tron cycles abruptly flaring out to terminate in a silver dot cul-de-sac. That technology probably took us to the moon […]

Each trend report manages to identify a shape or two that rapidly populate every designer’s kit of parts like words that enter the news cycle based on a sheet of talking points. Every pundit uses the phrase like it spontaneously leapt to their lips, and every designer uses the shape of the hour with the […]

We’ve always thought of a petri dish as a fully contained eco-system that investigates bacteria and other phenomenon. Those clear dishes serve as our little round window into discovery of the unknown, while sealed to protect us from their content. Exactly like these logos. These micro views of a macro world are tightly cropped shots, […]

When evaluating the lift-off thrust of any trend, success is often measured between the born-on date and the rise to critical mass. If momentum doesn’t build, you’re doomed. On the other hand, popular trends tend to burn out overnight. We find variable type on a strong pace to have an influence on logo trends for […]

Hard to throw too much shade at a font that was Europe’s only choice from the 12th to the 17th century. Blackletter fonts never completely vanished and became the preferred text for Germany, which probably explains its recent resurgence with the vast array of microbrew pubs dotting corners across the globe. It’s never truly been […]

I like to imagine the conversations that take place in designer presentations I’m not privy to. After you’ve worked with enough clients you start to recognize some of the signs of client fatigue that lead a designer to give in on this thing or that. I picture the designer whose work has been stripped down […]

Take a look at this beautiful array of hands that are abundant this year. Dramatically different in illustration style, and beyond the hands themselves, there’s one distinct commonality: They all have something either hovering above them or we captured these elements in free fall. This may be symbolic of the magical essence of the relationship […]

A symbol is only a representation of a thing or concept. We know a human heart looks nothing like the symbol we use to represent it. Nor does a star, or fire or a cloud. The ancient Greeks used a symbol for lightning that looks nothing like our modern-day interpretation. And our interpretation, looks nothing […]

Those that follow this report annually may recall a few years back we identified the expanded use of four-pointed stars to which we assigned the name Sparkle. At the time, this group was fledgling, but typically appeared as a non-aligned star avoiding jingoistic or religious connotations with more points. Four points was enough to get […]

As designers, I cheer on any of our ilk that creates a product so engaging that the public becomes inextricably involved in it. I mean isn’t that one of our ultimate goals‒to captivate the public and create a symbol that can’t be ignored? Optical illusions often do that as do single perspective murals that shift […]

There are those things in life that can make us feel uncomfortable or on edge, but that captivate us nonetheless. It’s the old theory of a train wreck and not being able to look away. We may fain an objecting posture, but inside we want to take it in, secretly wishing we could stare at […]

Demonstrating dimensionality of form is a foundational way of shifting a flat image from 2nd, to at least 3rd gear. Finding that hybrid between committing to gradient tone and graphic surfaces that imbue reality and a simple vector outline really only offers up a handful of tricks. Shadow has long been a staple of the […]

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 […]

If you’ve met the person that groans when food on their plate touches, you’ve met the individual that will wince at these marks. Not only have designers removed any pretense of separation of elements, they’ve flaunted this layering of graphic components and even doubled down here and there to cloudy results. The majority of these […]

Shadow as an element in logo design is critical in so many ways. I’ve created full chapters discussing how shadow came about as such an important component to designers. It foretells events or gives a sense of place. They can display aspirations or other yet-to-be-determined assets. They identify the direction of light and tell if […]

An enthusiastic generation of designers are reinventing the wheel but with a whole new vengeance. In pre-digital years, any desire to lay stripes, dots, mezzotints, woodgrain or other exotic half-tones into an illustration first required a trip to your local commercial arts supply store. Sticky backed sheets of film under the names Zipatone or Letratone […]