Packaging

Making the Product the Package and Vice Versa

By Delphine Hirasuna | June 3, 2009September 4, 2014

choco12

Is it possible to brand a product without creating a printed label? At the Accademia Italiana in Skopje, Macedonia, design student Petar Pavlov was determined to find out. In a Packaging Design class, he was assigned the task of creating a packaging prototype for “something very dear to him.” He chose chocolate, he says, because it is “something that I can’t live without.”

Petar, whose study focuses on graphic design and visual communications, says that his obsession with typography, along with his decision not to use any printing for the packaging, inevitably led him to the idea of turning the chocolate itself into letterforms that spell out the name of the product.

Interior Architecture

Innovative Solutions for Flexible Spaces

By Delphine Hirasuna | May 21, 2009September 4, 2014

molo

Molo Design is tearing down rigid beliefs about what walls should be. The Vancouver, Canada-based creative firm , founded by architects Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen, has come up with an innovative family of soft architectural products made from paper and non-woven textiles. The core of molo’s collection is softwall and softblock, a modular space shaping system that allows users to form a wall or partition off an area without need of nails or construction tools. Like party decorations made out of honeycombed crepe paper, molo softwalls are based on a honeycomb cellular structure that can be expanded or compressed at will.

“When we originally designed softwall, we were looking into a solution for making homes smaller and flexible,” explains MacAllen. “The idea was that a home could consist of one main space that could be divided into smaller, more intimate spaces when required.” The pair began experimenting with lots of small paper models and discovered that the structure of honeycomb itself gives paper amazing strength that could be scaled up to large sizes.

Posters

Art Center’s Instrument of Creativity

By Delphine Hirasuna | May 14, 2009September 4, 2014

accd

For Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the humble pencil holds special significance as an instrument of creativity. Traditionally, it has been the way that designers first give visual expression to raw ideas surfacing from their subconscious. The erasable-leaded pencil gives artists and inventors permission to test concepts, doodle and sketch without committing anything to the permanence of ink.

For decades, Art Center has used the pencil as a symbol for creativity and artistic endeavors. Each year it recognizes the outstanding achievement of alumni with Gold and Silver Pencil Awards. For its donor wall, it has made a display of oversized pencils etched with the names of donors to the College. This year when Art Center launched its fund-raising effort, it asked one of its most illustrious alumni, Michael Schwab (Advertising, class of 1975), to create a poster for the campaign. Although Schwab’s strong graphic illustrations have become the brand identity for countless companies and for the Golden Gate National Parks, he admits that being asked to create something for his alma mater was both a “proud moment…and daunting assignment.”

Information Graphics

By Delphine Hirasuna | April 11, 2009September 4, 2014

Pie charts and bar graphs are the crude “stick” drawings of the Power Point world — unimaginative and dull, yet easier to grasp than spreadsheets and algorithms. But in the hands of designers, infographics can be so much more.