When French skin care company, L’Occitane, came out with a new limited edition shea butter hand cream, it departed from its usual simple packaging design and chose a colorful traditional African textile pattern, called mudcloth, instead.
Aside from the fact that the design is eye-catching and that tribal prints are in fashion, mudcloth, also known as Bogolan, seemed like an unusual choice for a company associated with the fragrances of Provence.
Monday the world reached an important milestone. The global population hit seven billion people, with the birth of a 5.5 pound baby girl in the Philippines. In anticipation of topping the seven billion mark, National Geographic Magazine has been presenting a year-long editorial series on population, with articles and videos on how this affects demographics, food security, climate change, fertility trends and managing biodiversity. This is one of its videos. By the way, since Monday’s historic event, the world population has gone up by more than a half million people and is climbing by about five births a second.
One in five Americans suffers from dyslexia, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Essentially that means their brains do not process or recognize certain letterforms and symbols. When looking at words, dyslexics tend to rotate, swap, twist, mirror and flop certain characters, making it difficult to comprehend what they are reading. The word “saw” may be read as “was,” for example.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful a typeface is; dyslexics still find them hard to read. In fact, probably the most elegantly fine typefaces are the toughest to make out.
When Nickelodeon sought to tout its new HD network in Europe, its parent company, MTV International, hired ManvsMachine agency in London to brand the channel. What they got back was a logo identity study that playfully took Nickelodeon’s screaming orange brand color and morphed it from one texture to another, from faux fur to plastic to globule bubbles, all reforming themselves back into the Nickelodeon logotype. It’s fascinating to view.
Sometimes a design solution is so obvious that many designers miss it because they are too busy trying to make complex connection to the product attributes, uniqueness, emotional appeal, market positioning, yada yada yada. All the while an elegant solution is buzzing right before their eyes. Such is the case with the packaging for Babees Honey, created by Ah & Oh Studio in Poznan, Poland. The familiar black-and-yellow bands on the bumble bee instantly suggest the product’s original maker, and the handwritten logotype is drawn like a bee merrily flitting from blossom to blossom collecting nectar. Simple. Charming. Sophisticated. Geometric. What’s not to like?
