I recently visited Barcelona, which is a very inspiring city for a designer. One evening I was looking for a typical tapas restaurant in the old streets of the city and I stumbled on the restaurant Bar Brutal, which has a great visual identity, with wide letterings painted on windows. Eventually I ate in another place but back at home I looked for the creator of this nice graphic design work and I discovered Lo Siento, a design studio full of character.
Here in France, (and I presume in some other countries too), Stromae is a very well known artist, having a large success these last years. One very special thing about him is his look, colourful and original. The artist has even launch his own apparel brand, inspired by his visual identity. And this identity is a great success in itself, with an amazing work of graphic design. The singer asked the belgian agency Bold to conceive it, and commonly they defined an isometric graphic system, inspired by Escher's famous impossible figures and african fabrics. Each song has its own pattern, based on a common grid. We can also notice the typographic work, with a special typeface derived from Century Gothic, in the same idea as the whole identity. And the icing on the cake : Stromae talks about his design agency in his interviews, something rare enough to be mentioned !
For their "On the road" untitled issue, creators of independant english magazine Little White Lies decided to get inspiration from Jack Kerouac and his famous book "On the Road". They produced the magazine with the same process as Kerouac wrote his manuscript : on a long single paper scroll, like the old volumens.
The result is a very unusual magazine format, mixing up writing machine text and original illustrations, directly drawn on the same paper scroll and almost in the same time. The "handmade" aspect is very present and recalls some artist's travel sketchbooks. Illustrations are varied and interesting, but the detail which really seduced me is the calligraphed headtitles, very dynamic and contrasting with the structured paragraph of machine typed texts.
Tres Hombres is a very special rum brand. Created by three european friends (they met each others on the sea), this rum, produced in the caribean, is the very first rum of the 21st century to be conveyed in Europe by an environment-friendly way.To achieve this goal, the three friends built a sailing boat, allowing them to cross the Atlantic ocean in two months, in order to deliver the product in Europe. The whole production tries to be as much ecological as possible, by labelling the bottles manually by example.
The branding has been created by dutch art director Kim Stassar. Even if it's not very original, it fits well to the simple but adventurous concept, like an invitation to the travel and the sea... The ship theme, which is pretty common in rum identities, gets here another dimension when we thought that the spirit has been delivered by this very special sailboat.
This beautiful package work, designed by Rice Creative for the brand Marou has already been published on package design websites, but I can't help writing an article about it. Marou, Faiseurs de chocolat is a high-end chocolate maker located in Vietnam, founded by a small french team who aims to create great products based on local farming production.
Lisa Fleck is a graphic designer and photographer based in Stockholm, Sweden. She's got a lot of skills, and her typography, graphic design and photography works are all interesting and inspiring. I particularly noticed her edition works for the Design Forum Vienna which seems amazing.
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