What Do You Consider Good Design?

It seems that it would be a wise idea to have a col­lec­tion of good design to study and learn from. Do you have a folder or file that you keep out­stand­ing design in? I do! I don’t put as much into it as I would like to, but here are a few of my favorite pieces and why I like them.

There is one glar­ing prob­lem with this first piece: I’m not sure what the com­pany name is! Is it I (as in G, H, I, J, K, etc), or is it 1 (as in 1, 2, 3, etc)? Well, at any rate, I know they serve cof­fee, drinks and food, so I guess that’s good. The biggest rea­son I like this busi­ness card is because of the way they wrote the phone and fax num­bers. They are pre­sented in the way that we say them: the area code, first three dig­its (pre­fix) and the last four num­bers. I think it would make it easy to dial and not lose your place while look­ing back and forth between the phone and the card. It also seems like a very trendy place to be. I get that feel­ing from the font. I also like that the card uses a ver­ti­cal ori­en­ta­tion rather than a hor­i­zon­tal one; that is dif­fer­ent from the norm.

This is a Cirque du Soleil desk­top. I like the com­po­si­tion in this one, par­tic­u­larly the sense of direc­tion. In west­ern cul­tures, we read from left to right, top to bot­tom, so nat­u­rally we start in the upper left hand cor­ner. There is a nice open space there to ease the viewer into the lay­out. Then we come across, mov­ing to the right and we find the logo. We hit the parade of men walk­ing down to the text (the two cir­cles are there just in case your eye tries to wan­der a lit­tle too far, they push you back up into the text). We fin­ish read­ing the text and make our way over to the pic­tures. What a nice lit­tle trip! The pho­tos also serve to anchor the lay­out and give it a lit­tle weight at the bot­tom so it feels like it’s fin­ished. We could, how­ever, con­tinue up to the line of men and back through the piece.

I really like Cody Curley’s work. This par­tic­u­lar page is a brochure he did for Lumiere Con­dos. I like this page in par­tic­u­lar because it has a very calm feel­ing. Cody pro­vided ample room around the text for our eyes to rest and the space also serves to empha­size the writ­ing. It feels very sophis­ti­cated; it doesn’t need a lot of in-your-face design to make its point. The jux­ta­po­si­tion of the ele­ments in the photo (round spoon, square sugar, round cups) he chose for this lay­out is also pleas­ant, orderly and sophisticated.

Annual reports from high end com­pa­nies, like this one from IMB Pro­vides many sam­ples of good design. Here is a neat exam­ple of the whole com­po­si­tion being one com­plete piece. There is no sep­a­ra­tion of text and photo; the text is inte­grated into and designed to be a part of the image. I enjoy the typog­ra­phy on this page, too. The design­ers thought about what was impor­tant and empha­sized that with color, size and style (reg­u­lar, italic, bold, small caps).

I know Toon from the Estet­ica Design Forum that I am a part of (which is a great place to dis­cuss and learn about design, by the way). He is an excel­lent logo designer and Online Secret is one of my favorite logos of his. Toon incor­po­rated the idea of a secret into this logo quite effec­tively. The beau­ti­ful round serif that he used for the text also lends a sense of suave and upscale atmos­phere. I don’t know any­thing about what this client wanted, but that’s what I get from the final result and I can mimic these aspects in a design where I do know what a client is look­ing for.

Of course we can’t for­get about web design among all this print stuff, and for that I turn to Jon Tan’s site. In com­par­i­son with many other sites out there, Jon has man­aged to set him­self a part with his sexy use of typog­ra­phy (hey, how would you describe it?). In his About sec­tion, he states that “the design grew out of thoughts on West­ern type and print ver­sus Chi­nese typog­ra­phy and cal­lig­ra­phy.” I like the clean, no-nonsense lay­out he presents and how he has found ways to make the hier­ar­chy work almost entirely through typog­ra­phy alone. The sparse use of color also allows its use to make quite a state­ment; it really stands out when its present.