100 Years of Bauhaus

2019 marks the centurion anniversary for the School of Bauhaus. To celebrate this iconic mark in the timeline of graphic design, I am going to be creating a small series of designs for posting onto my social media profiles across various channels. As an introduction to the series, here is a short segment on how the School of Bauhaus has influenced the way I design.

Bauhaus refers often to the idea of 'function over form'. It is this element of Bauhaus that resides with me the most in my work, most often in UI/UX design. Going back to my discussion of User Interface vs User Experience, if it had to, Bauhaus would back the side of user experience. The reason for this is because User Experience is function and User Interface is form, and so User Experience over User Interface.

When I’m working on any creative project, I always begin with the idea stage and the research stage shortly after or during. This means I can, before making anything, have an idea on what the user requirements are, thus allowing me to tailor the interface(s) around the practical and functional needs first.

If if the project is a screen based media project, i.e. a mobile app or responsive website, before wireframes are developed I will make decisions on the content management system of the app or website. All of these decisions will be relative to the user of the app specifically and unique to each project.

Photography Part 2 – What next?

After almost a month of creating my photography sub-brand I have produced 7 more posts to my Instagram profile; broke even on follower to following ratio and received engagement from verified profiles, including the drives and brands I have tagged in my photos.

What's my next move? With the race season nearing, I am currently posting my best photos from my archive. I have researched into some valuable photographers within the motorsport photography industry and what they are doing on a daily, even hourly basis. Photographers like Larry Chen, Paddy McGrath, Jamey Price & Mat Acton.

I am focusing myself to start with on the British Touring Car Championship and supporting series'. For me this is a huge part of my accessible and inspired disciplines and will be a great place for me to begin my journey in writing stories with photos.

My main goal and focus for my next motorsport shoot is to experiment with shutter speeds. The majority of my photos are taken with a quick shutter speed to remove blurring of the subject. However I am aware that great photos can be blurry in the motorsport scene. So my challenge is to nail this technique and get some great looking panning/tracking shots and making the most of the fantastic equipment I have access to.

Landor Kellogg’s Packaging Redesign

Last week (26th February 2019), Kellogg's released the largest redesign of its cereal boxes to Europe in 113 years. The century old company commissioned Landor - 'A global leader in brand consulting and design' to lead the change.

The rebrand shows off elements flat design styles and routes of Swiss Design. The branding and logos have had their previous depths and shaded removed to either entirely single colours or one other shade used for shadows. It could be argued therefore that the harsher, bolder and more contrasting components have been curated to grab the consumers attention. The fact that there has been a redesign of the packaging for such a large household name brand will already do this.

In response to Shaun Smith's review article on this redesign, I believe that the intent of the redesign, as with near all big name rebrands, is to reinstate their presence within their industry with the publicity they have already gained. Such as the statistics Creative Review published in their response to the redesign.

Officially, Kellogg is pointing to internal research showing that nearly 70% of regular Kellogg’s consumers were better able to find the new packs on supermarket shelves. They also claim the new packs increased purchase intent by almost 50%. – Tom Seymour, Creative Review

Agreeing to an extent with Smith that the new design takes away the status of its traditional 'advert titans' such as Coco the Monkey and Tony the Tiger. Behind this statement I think that the characters and former sub-brand icons have been lightly simplified similarly to Freddie the Chimpanzee of Mailchimp's Rebrand at the end of 2018. I respect that this in some cases could be seen as reducing their value as part of the Kellogg's brand, however I am apposed to this opinion as the decisions behind these minor adaptations is relative and cohesive with the design style as a whole. It only loses the nostalgia of the original characters. For me, this doesn't take away from the brand or the new packaging.

Creative Review proposed the question 'Are they starting to respond to political pressure?' Smith elaborates on this referring to a fine line between modern and boring designs in the post-modern post-iPhone ‘seek design world.' There is a fine line no doubt, Swiss Design is one of the graphic design styles which appears strongly simplistic and to the untrained eye, effortless. However there is an art to executing a Swiss Design inspired piece well, Landor did it well.

Smith's last point with regards to the logo revival expresses that using one solid colour for the name is an 'oversight' and that it leads to the colours clashing on some of the boxes. On the other hand I think that this decision, similar to the characters, fits with the 'new style' that limits the colour palettes almost as much as possible. The red throughout all of the designs is part of the consistency that has been produced, the white versions for red boxes works better than if they had continued to use the previous version with a white outline. For example on the Froot Loops packaging the old logo would have been entirely lost with only a white outline.

He also raises a point about the logo that it unnecessarily bleeds over the edge of the boxes. It does. Comparing the boxes to the bags of muesli, Landor has made a decision to show the entire logo on the bags but crop the apostrophe and the s on the boxes. I think the reason this has been done on the bags is because the consumer of muesli is going to be more mature, they don't need to have the loss of ascenders and continuation of to want to read the back of the package for the nutrients and other information. Whereas the consumer of the boxed products subconsciously will be drawn around the box to these other areas of content. The boxes are also much larger, so the depth of the product arguably feels more 'wrapped' and sealed by bleeding the elements so much.

I think the compositions of the boxes are well executed and consistent. The use of the space prioritises the product, the real photos of the cereals are sat on a solid foundation of the individual items colour and give weight to the packaging by sitting at the bottom. From this, the rest of the design elements wrap around the product shot and eventually will lead you from the mascot to the ingredients and nutrients.