DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the images used in this post, nor is the original artwork mine. The assignment was to seek out good and bad designs merely for understanding design purposes and concepts. All photographic content belongs to the rightful owners. The below images will not be used for any professional promotion.
I've found three "good" designs and three "bad" designs. Below each design, I will give a brief description about why I think the design is good or bad as well as why it appeals to me. The caption section is the source of the image.
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| http://yellowbluebus.info/page/3/ |
We see elements of graphic design in our world every day, but usually it's on packaging, billboards, and other expected "grounds". Depending on where we look, the structure and overall feel of a design tends to be predictable (for instance, magazines differ from food packaging; we don't tend to find elements and compositions of traditional magazine layouts on cookie packaging, etc). What I love about this design, is it breaks away from our traditional views of typography on architectural structures (usually we see large signage depicting "Restroom", "Elevator", "Crate&Barrel", "Apple", etc.). What appeals to me about this design is that we do not normally see typography in the form of paragraphs on walls--especially not paired with a very clean, chic photograph that compliments the modern feel of the type on the wall. Compositionally, I can follow the grid of the text layout; because of the simplicity of the grid, the unexpectedness of seeing text on a wall does not overwhelm me as a viewer. Also, the text appears to be an appropriate size... not too small nor too large for readability purposes.
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| http://www.designer-daily.com/hondamentalism-397 |
I really enjoy the underlying homage to Russian Constructivism in the design, especially since it's been modernized and made relevant to the content of the spread. Constructivism heavily emphasized on movement within an artwork--forcing the viewer to "make their way" through a piece; the fact that the spread seems to be illustrating and discussing movement (the bicycle wheel, etc) makes me feel the energy and movement of not only the design, but also the energy and movement of riding a bicycle. Also, the one element that really stands out to me as being visually appealing and pleasing is the bicycle wheel mirroring the shape of the man's head. The circular nature of both the wheel and the head breaks up the harsh straight lines of the text alignment and red diagonal bars. Resting my eye on the man's face (mostly, his eye) persuades me to feel the intensity of the article and what it means to be an athlete.
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| http://www.hyperlabs.net/tree/typography.html |
I have never seen typography executed before in such a fashion that it transcends from a graphic art to a fine art. I believe this piece does that beautifully, and everything about the concept and execution of this piece is incredibly clever to me. I love the way the ink bleeds to create such an organic figure/composition. The black and white mixed with the watercolor (or suggestion thereof) reminds me of Zen Buddist art. The large "S" and "W" adorning the edges of the leaves helps bring the design full-circle to really emphasis that text is a huge part of this design (a nice reminder for those of us who get caught up in the fine-art nature of this piece).
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| http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/zurich-london-poster-exhibition |
Where to even begin here? First off, there are way too many colors and elements haphazardly thrown into this design that makes me not even know how to begin reading the design. Next, my eyes fall on the Olympic rings, which then begins to give the rest of the poster context, but with the yellow coloring of the background image, the rings begin to get lost and I (and probably most viewers) start to battle with the hierarchy order of information. The typography breaks because of the hard returns that logically do not make sense, and then to make matters worse, the last half of the word begins running into another word--creating a new, unknown, unwanted word jumble. I am also confused as to why all of the typefaces have very mathematical arms and stems, and the O's are very mathematically precise, but then the 2's curl? I believe this to be a huge weakness in the choice of typeface. Everything about this poster is just very, very confusing.
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| http://trottlebee.wordpress.com/tag/bad-design/ |
I feel like this flyer embodies everything you learn in GRD101. Clip art graphics are a no-no (especially when the gradient on the earth overshadows the text (and everything else, really). Placing such a circular graphic dead-center acts like a bullseye and continually pulls my eye in despite trying to read content. The overall layout is low-res, which should have been addressed before being uploaded to the internet (and if it's too low-res for a monitor, it's too low-res for print!). The glows behind the text are amateur due to the manner in which they've been used and is akin to a photoshop filter in this context. Need I even mention the random blue boxes around some of the text? At least the design has a three column grid...
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| http://www.geniusgrafx.com/#!__services |
For advertising graphic design work, I find this design to be a poor choice. For starters, while there's nothing really wrong per-say with the layout, the typeface seems like a stock typeface that does not sell versatility and creativity very well. If I were seeking out a graphic designer, I would want someone who's individuality came out in their work, and I do not see that here. The typeface is trendy and markets stereotypically only to young men. The colors are harsh; there is something that puts me off about seeing such solid red, yellow, green, and blue colors together. Maybe it's because I feel like the colors are generic, basic colors (which I believe is what also really enhances my distaste for the typeface; the generic colors enhance the genericness of the typeface). I do not feel like this type of design is something that a professional designer should ever sell to a client; I feel like with a little bit of basic knowledge of how to download font and change the colors, any joe with a computer could have created this.
