designfusion

It was the cover of the BALTIC guide that caught my eye online recently, but these spreads definitely deserve their own 15’ of fame. Designed by Founded, the Guide is the primary communication tool for BALTIC to inform the public of it’s season activities. Its design is simple but effective, with emphasis on the photographs; they and take up most of the page, leaving just enough space for accompanying text and information as well as white space. I really like how the titles work nicely along the bold numbers at the top, and the lines… Make sure to check the rest of their work, I’d probably post most of it if I could! 

Brutalist typography and clever illustration for the poster of wine documentary Somm.

My latest graphic crush is with the work of Face, an intelligence-driven supermodernist design studio, based in Monterrey, Mexico whose work range includes design solutions, advertising, editorial projects and custom publishing, corporate identity, web design and brand development. My favourite project is Folio,  a container for design topics, that doesn’t contaminate the design itself or the content. It’s not hard to see why; bold but sophisticated typography, smart use of colour and photography and a layout that looks and feels fresh. Add all that up and you can call it a win instantly. To be honest, it had me at that thick black line on the cover. 

I’m trying really hard not to start every post with “I love…” but this is really giving me a hard time. It’s like art direction at its best: The colour palette, from the hair to the coat to the wall, it is perfect. The way the seats have been photographed, the styling… it could be a still from a movie. 

For the record, Mohini Geisweiller make lovely electronic music and their track Milk Teeth is hugely addictive. 

Good-ol’, heart-filling typography for Richard Rowley’s ‘Dirty Wars’.

The poster for the 15th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, was designed by Greek design agency Freelance. They were the winners of the open call for submissions by the Festival, and according to Yannis and Vasilis, the guys who run the agency, viewers are bombarded daily with views and ideas that often try to close their eyes, to manipulate them. Turn them into ‘sheeps’ who faithfully follow the mass. It’s up to them to extricate himself from this trap. A good start is thinking. And documentaries supply the best food for thinking, they raise concerns and awareness, they awaken.

PAPER is the supplement magazine that comes with Greek financial newspaper Hmerisia (Daily) on Sundays. It is a very well made and designed publication, but for the January issue, they tried something different: they turned the magazine into a newspaper. A very big and stylish newspaper.



Its size, more or less, is that of a conventional newspaper but what makes PAPER stand out is, well…the paper. It’s heavier than the standard newsprint, which in turn makes the newspaper more heavy and solid; it feels very good to hold. Gone are the glossy cover and the shiny pages, this edition counts on something more substantial. The people and their stories.



The layout is very interesting, since it is simple but effective. Strict but welcoming. It feels safe and familiar, like a wise, grown-up relative. There is nothing fancy about it - this is after all a newspaper - but it works great as it takes advantage of the size and the white space it provides.

PAPER is a successful combination of the two formats and their best traits: it carries the gravity, the ‘importance’ and the looks of a newspaper (serif story titles, drop caps, lines between the columns) but it is a newspaper with a magazine face-lift and a treatment that consists of thoughtful and playful art direction and great use of photography. 

Masthead:

Creative direction: Manos Daskalakis & Vasso Getti
Art direction: Dimitris Mitropoulos & Stelios Helmis

thepapercity:

Stephen Holl Architects - Sliced Porosity Block, Chengdu, China. 

Pretty incredible image here - ‘render’ is now a real life material. 

How District9 must have looked like before it all started. It’s pretty alarming when you can’t tell the difference between CGI and real life. 

Being a film aficionado, I’ve come across many film posters, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before. No actors’ names, no details, no reviews. Just a photograph, still from the movie and a logo. Yes, a logo. Besides Zoro and a few action hero films that bear their own signs, Upstream Color is one of the few films that comes with an identity, almost like a brand. Even though that specific image is very popular online, that typographic logo was the first thing that caught my attention. 

I like the idea of movies being advertised and promoted in a non-traditional way. I don’t know if it’s a trend or a ‘less is more’ approach, but it is almost like it’s not that much about who’s in the leading roles anymore. It is about creating a world and a journey to that world that starts way before the lights go down in the theatre. What this poster does, is to create a very strange, intriguing and rather unsettling world that not much makes sense. And the trailer matches that world perfectly.