Victor Ginsburg Muller of Print Magazine's Imprint blog dares to try and sum of graphic design into just three distinct styles. He calls them "Swiss-style," "Grunge" and "Book." Mullers says that design has come full circle back to the "Grunge" style. He also points out that lately we're missing a "personal and unique touch" as well as "the feeling of something genuine and true" in most of today's design. Here he shows us an example of a graphic designer – Lowe Steiner – who stays true to his style and maintains that personal touch.
He also shows how a web designer also achieves this...
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| See more from Mike Kus here. |
I have to say after getting lost in Mike Kus' website for quite some time, I began to wander to other graphic designer portfolio sites and blogs to find that yes, there are many designers out their who seem to have lost the personal, homemade touch or creating work that is "sweetly naive" as Muller puts it. The designs however that did seem to achieve this (like the ones above), I truly found inspiring. Everything from the color usage, to the type treatment, to the quirky patterns and shapes make the design so much more genuine. I look forward to see how this valued aspect of graphic design will transfer to my future designs.
See the full Imprint blog post here.
[You Can't Miss]: A type-tastic gift for your designer friends (Ahem...)
Imprint shows us that typography can be even more fun that we realized! (Sorry, last post on something from the Imprint blog for awhile after this one, I just couldn't resist.) This flashcard game has you guess the font, gives you interesting information about the letters and even gives a general history of each font. See the Imprint blog entry here, and purchase the game here... your designer friends will thank you.
[You Can't Miss]: Speaking of type...
"You look like the right type." This blog is great, I found it off of the design blog I'm closely following this semester, designers-who-blog.com. I've enjoyed exploring this blog for typographic inspiration, obviously, but also to learn how to add a little quirkiness to my designs. The typography and illustrations on this blog are perfect examples of the success of designing the way Muller describes above in his "Back to Grunge?" post on Imprint.
What a fun game! I feel like I can generally pick a pretty good typeface to match my design theme, but I know I need to better my typeface knowledge. I feel like there's a great deal of historical knowledge I need to get caught up on when it comes to typeface and the evolution of graphic design as a whole.
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