The cable TV channel home of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” Comedy Central has achieved a level of credibility that no longer matches its current logo. The name stuck on the globe with skyscrapers sprouting off the top looks like it was designed in a dorm room. Maybe it was. Once thought of as the basic cable channel featuring adolescent humor, Comedy Central has grown up. Its new logo, designed by The Lab, has too.
Monika Ostaszewska was a student at the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw when she focused her graduation project on a packaging concept for a region in Poland known for the quality of its food products. Her idea was to create an umbrella brand called “Flavours of Podlaskie” for the region itself and sub-brands for each category of local food producers.
Aside from the fact that we find these shopping bags funny, they show the possibilities when designers literally think outside of the bag. When approaching an assignment, designers typically focus solely within the boundaries of the product itself, whether that is the edges of a page or the shape of a three-dimensional object. But sometimes the cleverest design answer presents itself in the way and in the environment in which the product will be used. What’s terrific about these shopping bag designs is that the user unwittingly is made part of the graphic solution. It takes the user’s participation to complete the visual pun.
One is reminded of the mysterious stone heads on Easter Island and the terracotta warriors unearthed in China, but the underwater sculptures unveiled at Mexico’s Cancun Marine Park last week are brand new. British artist Jason de Caires Taylor made 400 life-size statues, casts from molds of real people, from an 85-year-old nun to a three-year-old boy. Then the concrete figures were sunk in shallow water that could be seen by divers, snorkelers and from glass-bottom boats.