I recently visited Japan and came across these striking posters in a subway station. I believe the posters were part of a campaign promoting the Tōhoku region as a place to visit. This is the region including Sendai, that has recently been effected by natural disasters and in typical Japan style, they are getting straight back to business!

The campaign caught my eye because it incorporates some timeless graphic design principles, taking inspiration from Bauhaus designers like Wassily Kandinsky. It focusses on simplicity, limiting the amount of text and the number of colours for maximum impact. The posters use striking angles, directing the eye and creating a dramatic effect.

The campaign was applied to various posters, ads and flags in transport stations throughout Japan.

設計のあなた

Anya

Beautiful Pages is the newly launched venture of Tiana Vasiljev who, as someone working in the creative industries, always had a self-confessed “out-of-control obsession with books.” When I saw the site I instantly set about making a “wishlist” of books and wanted to know more about how the online store came to be. Tiana was only too happy to answer my questions!
BrioDaily (BD)What was the idea behind Beautiful Pages?

Tiana Vasiljev (TV): Like many creatives, I have always had an out of control obsession with books. A substantial amount of my annual salary over the years was dedicated to purchasing new books and magazines. Beautiful Pages was initially a selection of 75 design books that had inspired me as a graphic designer over the years. They all had a positive and inspiring impact on my work, attitudes and design knowledge. They were books I felt every designer could benefit from having in their design library.

Through Beautiful Pages we wanted to create an online graphic design store where Australian designers (and designers all over the world) could go to be inspired. A creative online space that both students and professionals could visit any time of the day and easily purchase products that would fuel their imagination. We hope Beautiful Pages serves as a reminder to designers about the beauty of real ink on paper, the importance of the printed page and the pleasures and benefits of owning these beautiful books, magazines and printed pieces.

BD: What have been the biggest challenges launching the site?

TV: The biggest challenges with the site were setting up accounts with all our distributors and managing the finances and cash flow. My education is in graphic design so it was a little hard in the beginning juggling other aspects of the business. But I’ve been lucky enough to have some wonderful help along the way and all the orders and emails that keep coming through from designers all over Australia have been amazing and very motivating.

BD: Where do you gather your inspiration? (books, websites, shops, people)?

TV: Just visiting my own design library! Most of the books that are now sold on the website I first became familiar with over my first few years of being a graphic designer – and I have managed to build up quite the collection. There are many publications that I used to read years ago while studying at Enmore TAFE, books and magazines that my previous colleagues introduced me to and publications I have seen and purchased along the way.

I have travelled a great deal over the last few years and also lived in London for a year. I was always visiting galleries, museums, exhibitions and bookstores. I compiled a wish-list (I have over 50 pages now) of all the products I came across during my travels that I found to be either beautiful, beneficial or both. Beautiful Pages is a small (but growing) collection of the products that have turned out to be both.

BD: How do you select what goes onto Beautiful Pages?

TV: Beautiful Pages offers a very carefully curated collection of design books and products, selected by graphic designers – for graphic designers. The store carries a collection of both classic and new publications. Every product on the site needs to be beautiful – but most importantly – must be well written, inspirational and carry an important message.

Typography is a crucial topic in most of the featured publications and we do tend to place special emphasis on (but not limited to) modernist graphic design. Swiss graphic design and typography plays an important part in the collection, as does the work of many influential graphic designers including Alan Fletcher, Otl Aicher, Wim Crouwel, Armin Hofmann, Jan Tschichold, Herbert Spencer, Wolfgang Weingart, Emil Ruder, Josef Muller-Brockmann and Milton Glaser to name just a few.

BD: How important is it to you to promote Australian design and how can we foster a greater design industry?

TV: Our most important long-term goal is to help promote and support Australian design. We have started investing funds into purchasing a range of books and magazines created by Australian designers. These currently include the work of Thursday Design, Michael Hall, The Initiative, David Pidgeon and Half Court Press. We look forward to seeing this collection grow over the coming months and encourage designers to submit their recommendations or published work.

We can all help foster a greater design industry by building ties with like-minded creatives, collaborating on projects and promoting each other. We need to start advertising and exporting Australian work to overseas markets and with the boom in online sales there’s no better time to be doing it than now.

Beautiful Pages is 100% Australian owned and operated. When designers purchase products from our website they are also helping to support the Australian economy.

BD: Lastly, future plans for Beautiful Pages?

TV: We have lots of plans for the future. Our wish list is very long, our product range is expanding every week and we’re aiming to have the full collection up by mid 2012. We are also looking at the possibility of opening a small shop space in late 2012, but this is still at very early stages.

If designers have any requests, suggestions or would like Beautiful Pages to stock their merchandise, please email us: info@beautifulpages.com.au

We look forward to getting to know you over the coming months and hope that through the site we can spark a bit of inspiration and creativity in all of you.

Beautiful Pages: Twitter | Facebook | Website

Giveaway

As a special treat for Brio Daily readers Beautiful Pages are giving away two books by Paul Arden, ‘It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’ and ‘Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite’

Winners will be chosen at random. To enter, email your name and postal address to lani@briogroup.com.au 

Entries close COB on Tuesday Oct 18, 2011 and open to Australian residents only.

UPDATED

Thank you to everyone who entered our very first competition. I’m delighted to say that two winners have been drawn, at random. We used random.org to randomly generate the winners. Congratulations to Mathew H and Deanna H. We’ll be in touch very shortly!

Yours in design inspiration,

Justine.

In an article with The Atlantic, one half of the duo behind this trend Jamie Beck says they are “something more than a photo but less than a video”. Beck (a photographer) and her partner in crime Kevin Burg (a web designer with a background in motion graphics) are based in New York and believe “there something magical about a still photograph – a captured moment in time – that can exist outside the second the shutter captures.”

What fascinates me is the subtlety of the movement. Often you have to look at the image for a moment before realising what elements has been animated. It is simple in it’s beauty. What excites me is the potential cinemagraphs have for branding and advertising for use on websites or digital campaigns. For example, look at their use during New York Fashion Week. I see it lending itself quite nicely to food, lifestyle, travel websites.

You can view Jamie and Kevin’s creations on their Tumblr, From Me To You or on their official website.

Tripwire Magazine

Stanley Kubrick Cinemagraphs

Tumblr

Yours in cinemagraph,

Justine.

Australian graphic designer and artist Linus Dean has married his love of design and keen eye for style to create this savvy and on-trend range of rugs. Hand loomed in Tibet and Nepal from silk and wool Dean draws upon global typography inspiration to create this bright and bold range.

From New York, Barcelona, Melbourne, Sydney, and my two personal favourites in the collection, London and Paris the rugs are bold and definitely a statement of style.

Linus Dean's 'London' Rug

Yours in rugged typography,

Justine.

These two interesting questions come from a TED Talk by Mick Ebeling, an entrepreneur who did something amazing and helped “unlock a locked-in artist”. He helped give a paralysed artist who had only the use of his eyes a way to express himself artistically again.

It got me thinking about accessibility, designing and developing for an open and accessible web, and what designers and developers can do to improve user experience today.

While we design our public transport systems and our buildings to be as accessible as possible where ever possible, it’s not always something that always springs to someone’s mind when they ask to have a web page built. So I thought I’d share a couple of important tips and tools, plus some questions to ask yourself when having a website designed or built.

1) Would someone with a hearing or visual impairment be interested in what my website has to offer?

When your website is getting designed or built, it’s important to factor these people into your target audience. Your website or content could be a valuable source of information for this broad demographic and ensuring that it’s accessible could be advantageous to the community and to your business.

2) Have I ensured that my design is readable, logically structured and presented in a way that those with any disabilities or impairments can still enjoy an insightful and meaningful experience?

It may not be applicable in every design you produce but some small seemingly obvious points should be considered when producing a design for web. For example, the use of high contrast navigation for readability. This is important because screen readers read content in a linear fashion, meaning the structure of your content should be designed to flow logically. Sighted users are advantaged in that they can discern content from layout much easier.

3) Has the site been tested during and at the completion of its build to ensure that it has valid HTML, CSS and Web Accessibility tools such as Bobby or WAVE?

There are a multitude of tools to ensure that the sites you build are accessible, but even a simple HTML and CSS validation could dramatically improve the user experience and accessibility of your website.

These simple guidelines share some helpful basic tips. If you’re interested in accessible design and web, please contact Brio Group to discuss or implement web accessibility practices into your site, and help us move toward an accessible and enriched digital experience for everyone. Regardless of how much or little you know, you can help make changes for the better.

Yours in web accessibility standards,
Lee

Yours in refreshed perspective,

Tara

It’s no surprise then, that effective cut-through communication relies on the mutual understanding of those words and their intended meaning by both sides in the communication equation – sender and receiver. We often forgot that with the rise of social media it’s not enough to simply send your message out into the world; it needs to be understood quickly so it can be processed and acted upon even quicker.

I saw a video recently of a homeless man on the street, his sign saying “PLEASE HELP, I’M BLIND”. He had a few people stopping by and giving money, but nothing that would greatly ease his suffering. He had the right message, but the wrong words to create action in his audience.  His message wasn’t cutting through all the other market place noise.

The clip continues as a professional woman comes into shot. She pauses, picks up his sign. You see her hastily writing something, but you’re unsure what. The homeless man touches her shoes as she puts the sign back into position beside him. The scene changes and more donations are being given to help, the homeless man scrambling to capture all coins in his tin. The professional woman returns after some time and the homeless man recognises her by her shoes, which he’s felt again. He asks with genuine sincerity and appreciation, what did she do to his sign and her reply? “I wrote the same, with different words”.

She used the right words, in the right context to create cut-through communication and connection between sender and receiver, and the effect in this demonstration was profound. Imagine if all your communication was received this way.

Brio Group can help you find the right words to achieve cut-through communication in the busiest of marketplaces. We also offer helpful hints on writing better Press Releases, creating copy for your ads and understanding the rapidly growing business benefits of social media.

Yours in 355 specifically chosen words,

Sheri

I woke up this morning bursting with blog article ideas – weekend outings, upcoming events, social media trends, mind blowing marketing campaigns – but then I got to work, and the words disappeared like water droplets in the desert.

I was stuck at a creative roadblock and regardless of the subject I started on; I failed to find the flow. I started searching online, frantically trying to find a theme that could inspire readers, inspire creativity and give me a topic all rolled into one. But alas, nothing was found. Until that is, I employed a little technique I learnt during a Copywriting course with Ad School last year.

The technique is easy to learn and simple to perform. All it requires is a piece of paper, pencil, a few words (maybe a dictionary will help) and 100 blank boxes on a page.

So I took a deep breath, opened my dictionary and based on the first word that appeared (pineapple) I started drawing whatever came into my head. For one whole minute I let my stream of consciousness flow, and it was refreshing not to have to get it “right” first time around.  I continued doing this, randomly finding words in the dictionary and drawing whatever idea, thought, or image came into my head until 10 minutes had lapsed.

Until that is, I arrived here, telling everyone about the 100-box technique and how it’s a lifesaver for anyone in need of a creative solution.

In times of creative droughts, how do you find and cultivate your creativity?

Yours in creativity,

Sheri

Web developer, David Novakovic, was paired with illustrator, Steven Rhodes. Novakovic developed a program to monitor the world’s tweets for any mention of ‘firsts’. The two then collated the data and the most interesting firsts were illustrated by Rhodes.

Product designer, Neil Davidson, was paired with motion designer, Joyce Ho and they looked at the origins of the very first motion design, which came from a 5 stage goat illustration. They created candle holders with these images, so that the candle would flicker to create movement.

Photographer, Skeet Booth, and sculptor, Tony Powell, created a moving sculpture that tackled the question “Who came first, the chicken or the egg?”

See photos of the other artworks on the Seven With Another facebook page.

The next Seven with Another exhibition opens on 27 May 2011.

Yours in design,
Anya

For those of you who don’t know what a Fractal is, Dictionary.com defines it as:

“–noun Mathematics, Physics .

A geometrical or physical structure having an irregular or fragmented shape at all scales of measurement between a greatest and smallest scale such that certain mathematical or physical properties of the structure, as the perimeter of a curve or the flow rate in a porous medium, behave as if the dimensions of the structure (fractal dimensions)  are greater than the spatial dimensions.”

At even the most intellectual time of day can be a difficult definition to get your head around. Thankfully, these structures can be visualised or graphed (which helps those of us who are less number-driven get a pretty good grasp on the concept without having to pull out some math textbooks), they can even be used in design. What? How? Brain explosion?

To help illustrate just how well math and design play with one another, here are a few examples prepared earlier (click on the Artist/Title/Image to visit their source).

Yours in mathematical-design fusion,

Lee

-Air- by =silwenka

Links by Tatiana Plakhova

Links by Tatiana Plakhova

Links by Tatiana Plakhova

Astral Rainbow – Warm by VolantKnave

Colourful Dragon by Goldey–Too

Oriental Illusions by Anna Kirsten

Telperion by LinelOske