The Trip - Movie Poster

Original Dubonnet Wine Poster

Designer Daily brings us another one of their great collections. This one looks at movie posters from last year. Most seem to be from indie films which is not just OK, but pretty appropriate and not surprising since most Hollywood big budget blockbuster movie posters aren’t really concerned with good design. Instead they want to get you in the theater right ASAP.

All of these movie posters do an awesome job at letting you know very quickly what the movie is about (which is after all, the function of the movie poster in the first place).

I chose to include the one for the movie The Trip (which is great BTW–I thank my wife for suggesting we watch it) because it is clearly and purposely ripping off of the famous Dubonnet wine advertisement poster from 1956.

The writers at Designer Daily also recommend this gallery at Mubi.com which includes these plus more goodies, and some actual big budget hollywood blockbuster type movie posters that actually are good. You can view the full gallery at Designer Daily here. Happy movie watching!

2011 Logo Trend: Banded

The report for 2011 shows that color is still prevalent, but scaled down in the form of tints. Brown or gray is dominating the neutral hues. Meanwhile blues and greens are softer. They’re seeing more Pinks too.

Lightness is being carried out in other ways: Airier shapes that seem to lift off the page, line weights are thinner, and there’s plenty of transparency as well. Here’s a quote that sums up this year’s trend rather well.

It feels like what people believe a logo to be is also becoming more transcendent. A logo is no longer a single piece of flat art. It can be a favicon, an icon, or an entire set of marks that work together to support the team. Its boundaries have become less strict as well. There was a time when most logos could be enclosed in a simple hand-drawn square, circle or similar geometric shape, but now many logos drag outside those outlines. They just don’t want to fit the old mold.

Here are the trends they identified this year:

• Gradients
• Juvi
• Vibrate
• O
• Earth
• Monoline
• Series
• Brown
• Dandruff
• Concentric
• Loopys
• Banded
• Comma
• Buckys
• Fruit

Check out the full gallery here. Image courtesy of LogoLounge. Credits: 1. BrandBerry, Artive 2. Higher, Voscast 3. Dickerson, Healing Touch 4. Frog Design, Microsoft Word

2010 Logo Trend: Shift

Catching up myself with LogoLounge’s annual logo trends. Last year was awesome for logos!

This year some of the tools available to designers has had a hand in some of these trends. For example, new Ilustrator tools such as Swirl, Pucker, and Scriptographer have clearly left their mark. We also see that current events also influence ideas that make their way into logos. For example, O-shaped logos popped up after the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections. There are also new standards like Transparency. We’ve seen plenty of them now to be perceived as a trend. Transparency is here now. We also see an increase in hue brightness, and  it’s most likely due to the pervasive use of on-screen color, which is light that is projected (and also RGB and not CMYK). Text based logos are really strong as clients and designers are distilling their messages to be concise and direct. The use of color has been greatly expanded.

Here are the trends they’ve identified for 2010:

• Cubist
• Spores
• Ghosts
• Tendrils
• Shift
• Parts
• Pixels
• Hexahedron
• Dust
• Peepshow
• Festoon
• Stains
• Burst
• Wallpaper
• Box-up

Check out the full gallery here. Image courtesy of LogoLounge. Credits: 1. Asta form, Sheriff Studio 2. Go Welsh, Penn State Architecture 3. Effusion Creative Solutions, musicplace.com 4. Liska + Associates Communication Design, Becker and Becker.

Absolut Blank Online Gallery

Iconic vodka Absolut continues the iconic branding campaign with a delightful gallery of finished Absolut-bottle-silohuette-turned-work-of-art pieces that are as fresh as 30 years ago when the campaign was new. The original campaign was created around 1980 by advertising agency TBWA. The focus of the campaign has always been  the unique shape of the bottle. TBWA worked with photographer Steven Bronstein, and now includes more than 1500 ads. It is the company’s longest running campaign. It’s clear why and why it has many more years to come. Always nice to peruse all the iterations of the now familiar bottle.

Looks like the W3C has announced a new HTML5 logo to brand their efforts to advance what may or may not become the new standard in web coding, the HTML5 web standard. It sure seems as if everything today needs some sort of branding. How else can we get a message across in a split second of someone’s attention? So, some gripe, some rejoice, some think that it’s controversial. Who, why?…

The New HTML5 logo by the W3C

Who? Web developers. And they’re not addressing the looks of the logo. Why then? Well, web developers are stating that with the new orange and black crest, the W3C is using HTML5 as a general term that includes all upcoming web tools and interweaving standards such as CSS and SVG. The claim is that these separate technologies all have applications outside of HTML and therefore the new brand somehow places them “under” or “inside” a general term like HTML5. The issue’s not aesthetic. While they do have a point, who can say if any of us knew what those technologies are or that they exist if it weren’t for HTML. Yes, in 10 years nobody will be mentioning it much, but we’re here right now and HTML brought us here whether we like it or not. And as always with branding, connective technologies need a hero. A single icon or meme that spreads in people’s minds like wildfire. And HTML is already here, so why not?

Gizmodo designers took a stab at logos for some of these technologies. Check out the Gallery after the jump. They’re all good too.

Starbucks is keeping up with the sense of pace that they create and manage for its ubiquitous brand.

They’ve updated their logo once again and this time with a decidedly minimalist presentation. They’ve put away the copy  “Starbucks Coffee” and the  palette is now one color.

All versions of the Starbucks logo applied to paper cups

Here’s a bit  of  what MSNBC had to say:

Starbucks says the changes amount to more than nips and tucks to its favorite lady. The fresh look goes with a new direction for the company as it makes its way back from its toughest times in its 40-year history.

The Starbucks logo through the years

And yes, we’re al familiar with the logo’s colorful controversy. A reminder courtesy of Adfreak for those who forget:

The inspiration for the siren logo—early versions of which have been called obscene by some—goes back to a 16th century Norse woodcut found by Seattle graphic designer Terry Heckler.

(pics and more via Starbucks)

Metropolis movie poster

I have to admit that I was looking forward to seeing the posters in this collection by Designer Daily. I think they’re very good for the most part. But the ones that I’m still thinking about are the ones that I did not expect to see in this collection.

I didn’t have any posters in mind, but I was not surprised to see the awesome Metropolis poster, 50′s sci-fi posters like The Forbidden Planet, and swinging 60′s posters like Vertigo. Those are the kind that while they do show very iconic and memorable eras of the movie posters, they represent what we already knew–our own western and typically commercial movie posters.

This collection becomes more memorable because it is including different posters that are from other countries and film genres. I was very glad to see the poster for The Wall (rock musical film), and the posters from movies from other countries like Teorema.

The collection also shows that no matter what era, a great movie poster could be executed many different using different elements to support the composition and convey the meaning. From typography to image+type placement to shapes+lines, you can clearly see that there is an abundance of things to do that are unique.

Why then is it that so many movie posters today have so many floating heads, cityscapes, actors standing around, and so many other unimaginative things. There is so much to choose from.

Moss Grafitti

Designer Daily brings us this collection of urban marking/marketing approaches that have clearly evolved (or de-evolved) with the times. This reflects the attitutes of a new generation of designers who not only want to do something different, but they view their surroundings in a different way. They’re more in touch with nature, and they’re concerned with materials and the impact of their designs on a global/environmental scale. More marketing than self-expression, they show a degree of creativity that is unusual for urban art. For now. They certainly grab attention.

They’ve grouped this collection into mini-series. Let’s see. We have Moss Grafitti, where text and graphics are on-the-wall and made of moss or grass. Very earthy. Chalk art is very playful and versatile and cheap. No steady hands? Make a stencil! Very nice. I dig the rock-n-roll logo/ad.

Reverse Grafitti

Reverse Grafitti is probably my favorite, simply because it involves removing what’s already there (dirt, mostly) and creating the designs in reverse. These have an air of purification somehow. They’re almost luminous because more light is reflected off the clean surface–much like when the wall was freshly painted or the concrete wall built. Very easy on the eyes.

Snow tagging is not only cool and has a nice texture, but it has the least impact of all. This type of communication is very temporary. And working with snow has a built-in expiration time. It’s also cheap to make your mark with a stencil and go around tagging snow around a city after a fresh snowfall.

Fur Coat Graffitti is more art than marketing but it certainly has its uses and it does grab attention. They show examples of animal shapes. Maybe throw in a little Fur Text? PETA anyone?