Atelier Martino&Jaña

The Atelier Martino&Jaña design project was started in 2000 by Joao Martino and Alejandra Jana and has grown in to a team of designers and collaborators. They are a Portugal based design company that who focus around design for print, usually magazine and editorial design.
They have quite a distinctive clean and simple design style which comes across as a with a really professional and considered look. They work a lot with incorporating photography in to their editorial design and clearly have a really good understanding of the use of type.

I'd like my double page spread to have the same kind of professional and well finished feel to it. 

Dan Marino - Corporate Identity

After looking through more of Marino's website I found this corporate identity which he designed for a charity called "Million Miles for Memory". Million Miles for Memory raises money and awareness for Dementia and Alzheimer's through a selection of different sports. For every mile completed more money is raised for research. the ultimate goal is to reach one million miles.
I am currently working on designing brand identity with the brief so it helps to see the process of how it is usually done. Luckily Marino has an example of the detailed process that he went through to create this identity.

Greenpeace - The Greatest Wonder

Here are some more examples of marine conservation awareness posters that Greenpeace have released in the past. These examples are a bit more like a series than the others as they all feature a similar colour palette and utilize the same kind of technique for communicating. 

These posters are photo edited designs which makes them all look quite similar and unifies them as a set. 

I think the basis for these designs is to grab attention and try to put the subject into context by creating metaphors that look just real enough to be quite clever and interesting. 

Again, each design has the Greenpeace logo.

Autentika - Corporate Identity

I think this is a really nice corporate identity and relates nicely to what I want to achieve for the print brief. These designers have stuck to the 5 colour restrictions which means that each separate piece of design is immediately linked by similarity. 

Along with the bright colours, the simple shapes used connote a kind of childishness and yet the quality and detail of the range suggests professionalism.

The end result is a playful look which relates especially well to the third image down:

"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

Children are renowned for having brilliant and unclouded imagination so the identity of the company is really suitable to a solutions company.

Brooklyn Fare

"Brooklyn Fare is a new, full service grocery store located in Downtown Brooklyn. The identity we created is very simple: one custom proprietary typeface (Fare Serif), four colors, and lots of witty copy. The text is useful in highlighting the store's diverse range of quality products and high standard of service, while at the same time presenting the customer with a bit of humor."


Pretty nicely summed up.
I'm not really into type but I can definitely appreciate the design. What I like the most is that they gave themselves a set of restrictions to work with while designing and it clearly paid off. I think that restrictions could stop a project from becoming lost in too many ideas and keep it focussed. This is definitely something to consider in my work as I almost always get sidetracked and confuse myself. 

Alternativa 3 - Fair Trade Products

Alernativa 3 are a Spanish based fair trade company who deal with producing high quality export products and make sure that all the workers get a fair share of the profits so that everyone gets what they have worked for. They produce coffee, chocolate and a few other products for sale. 

This company deal properly with human rights which I admire in any company and I am definitely interested in pursuing ethical-based design as a future. I also really like the simple designs and use of colour. 

Each design only has about 2 or 3 different colours on it which gives it a clear and bold packaging.

This is most likely a spot colour print job because of the few colours used. 

I also really like how each different type of the same product keeps the design and just changes the colour. This gives the products a sense of branding and unifies each individual design in to a group.

In the bottom example you can see that the same kind of design has been used across a few different products which shows that they are linked together.

I will need to create some kind of product branding for my print brief.

La Perle

These label and packaging designs for beer have a similar authentic and traditional feel to them as the Bacchus Frambozenbier from the print deconstruction exercise but they have managed it solely through design and have stuck with the contemporary labels on the bottle. 

 The clever use of 40's/50's imagery gives it a really old feeling as does the wrinkled look on the labels. I can't tell if the labels are actually wrinkled or not, but it is most likely just printed that way. the colours are also quite faded looking as though the print production was done a long time ago.

Again, the use of the brown bottle makes the product seem a lot more traditional than the green or clear bottles that are used in most contemporary beers.
The designer has also cleverly linked the images with the descriptions of the beers.
It has been designed so that the type of beer relates to the women on the bottle, i.e. Blonde, Brunette etc. which are already descriptions of beers and the designer has made a clever link.
Semiotically this descriptive system is really relevant. The comparison to the women is quite sexist and a bit demeaning as are the pictures of the women smiling and effectively becoming part of the product promotion. In a way the women are being directly compared to the beer as a product.
This was relatively normal behaviour in the 40's/50's so it links in with the rest of the packaging well.

Manta ray logos

I need to come up with an image to represent a manta ray for the net brief and as part of the on going print brief.
The manta ray is quite a strange animal in the way it looks and it is relatively unknown to a lot of people so representing it might be quite difficult. I don't want to have a picture of a manta ray that people look at and don't understand.
I found these existing examples of different representations of manta rays.