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The AIGA design archives house some of the more extensive visual resources of graphic design history. I frequent them often and have found some great work in promotional design, motion graphics, package design, typographic design and more from the past. I will share what I find with you and post it under its respective title over the next couple weeks.

To begin, here are some brand and identity designs from the past few decades:

Imagination Incorporated, 1986
Douglas May Design

This Is My Card, business card, 1969
Larry Miller

Southern California Savings & Loan, 1980
Robert Miles Runyan & Assoc.

CHAQWA, 2006
Jason Schulte Design

Green City, business card, 1996
Sagmeister, Inc.

I am a very active supporter of minimalism because many times the simplest designs are the most successful. Which of the above do you feel is the most successful and why?

Back in March, during the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX, the American Poster Institute presented the Flatstock 16 Poster Convention. The show featured original graphic art by more than 80 of the most popular poster artists working today. Around the same time, I had posted about a rock poster and its art history influences so I think it is fitting to give Flatstock some coverage. Below are a few of my favorites from the show.

Aesthetic Apparatus

Daniel Danger

Pedini

Small Stakes

Seattle Show Posters

For those that live in the Chicago area and would like to check out some posters first-hand, Flatstock 17 will be held at the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer in Union Park.

There are a lot of lists of color tools out there, but how many turn out to be of any use? The best tools are user friendly, easily customizable and provide you with every code or file format that you need. Below is a brief list (in no specific order) of color palette tools that I find the most useful for creating web, print and video projects and that I have actually used.

• Kuler
  Adobe’s color theme tool includes a large collection of community-created color themes that you can use for your creative projects. The most useful aspects of Kuler include the search feature by which you can search by hex color code, tags or theme title. The tags are great because you can find all of the themes related to a specific keyword. Kuler is an Adobe Labs application so you can download themes to use with Adobe Creative Suite applications, making integration with your designs a cinch.

• COLOURlovers
  A similar community site as Kuler, but with a bit more community. There are also a few differences that could be key to finding the perfect color theme for your project. The main focus of Colourlovers is color trends. So while you can browse community member themes, you can also check out the latest color trends found in popular and successful websites and magazines.

• Colorcombos.com
  Also has user-created themes and its combo tester application can be useful but nothing extremely different here except for usability preferences. However, the one thing that I really enjoy using is their tool that allows you to enter a website url and pull all of the colors used on that site. Really love the colors I use here on Dracula Vs. Eisenstein? Go to Colorcombos.com to find the color codes I used.

• ColourMod
  A dynamic, DHTML color picker that you can use for your site (small fee) or, more importantly to me, can be downloaded (for free) as a widget for Mac or PC. I have the Dashboard widget and I use it constantly when working between design applications. I used to need photoshop open to grab a swatch hex code to use in Flash or Dreamweaver and it was not fun, even when using Spaces on my iMac. I save time and RAM which makes life a little less stressful.

• Dhtmlgoodies.com Color Schemer
  You might take a look at this and wonder why this is on my list. Because its simple. Very simple. And quick. When you need a suggested complimentary color in a matter of seconds, this is a reliable tool. You click on a primary color or type in a hex color code and it generates suggested complimentary, split complimentary, triade, tetrade, analogic and monotone color schemes for you.

• Colorjack
  Like ColourMod, Colorjack offers a OSX Dashboard widget as well as a website color picker (this one is free!). You’ll have to compare the two color pickers to see if they are worth what they say. The site also has a color theme generator that you may prefer to others. Colorjack’s homepage is a huge block of random color themes, which on its own can offer some inspiration.

I certainly don’t use all of these sites for one project and I usually find one more useful depending on the individual task or project. If you have any color palette tools or sites that you find extremely useful, please add them in the comments below.

Milton Glaser is a legendary graphic designer, whose name may only resonate within the design community, but whose work has been seen by many. Not only has his most noted designs from decades ago had an influence on my work, but he continues to have an influence on my life. After September 11th, he updated his I Love NY logo and in 2003 he designed a “copyright-free” poster seen below for Another Poster for Peace. Funny (not at all) how five years later the posters are just as relevant as, if not more than, they were when they were originally designed.

In realizing how Glaser and other designers had influenced my work, I couldn’t help but wonder, “who influenced them the most?” I then came across an interview with Glaser from 2002, and discovered how timeless it was. Certainly I would be interested to hear what he thinks about the current state of the the Union, but even more interesting was reading about his influences and how he came to think the way he thinks. Graphic design after all is not just images and text. It is an idea communicated through images and text.

Click here to read Brad Holland’s interview with Milton Glaser.

Typographic art seems to be constantly evolving; It’s genetic matter made up of new styles as well as old, with the established as its skeleton. With the printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1456, traditional letter forms gave way to new cuts of type faces which were previously unheard of. Letterpress allowed the use of a combination of size, space and type face that opened the minds of printers and designers to all new possibilities. Contemporary graphic designers can sometimes neglect the history and the styles that were born of letterpress with the emergence of digital typography in the design world. The styles, techniques and rules that have stood the test of time are what graphic designers need to absorb, rather than replace with the generic simply because its easier.

The above design by Il’ia Zdanevich, for his and Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist announcement, Soirée du Coeur à Barbe, is an example of a typographical design previously unseen and made possible by letterpress. It’s use of contrast in type font, type size and white space, as well as its asymmetrical layout, was considered avant-garde at the time. These are now core design principals whose maker is often under-appreciated by the modern designer. Read the rest of this entry »

Graphic design seems to finally be getting some deserved attention from businesses these days and design-related salaries are steadily rising, however I can’t help but wonder what the overall perception of graphic design is from the general public. Good design can sell a product by consumers recognizing it as so. Products are more about style and what they say about their owner these days, rather than solely about the job it performs or the service it offers. This has led consumers to place certain products/companies on a cultural pedestal (people NEED their iPods). In the same way, consumers influence design by setting the bar on how it’s quality is measured.

There is an abundance of bad design in the professional world that is widely accepted and it is leading consumers to lower their design standards. This is one of the reasons the iPod absolutely exploded and became a cultural phenomenon. No other mp3 player at the time offered such ease of use AND looked amazing doing it. I’m getting a little sidetracked, but the point is that I decided to do a little experiment to see where most people are being exposed to graphic design and what quality of design is readily available to their eyes. Read the rest of this entry »