Mehmet Gozetlik decided to explore what would happen if he stripped down the packaging of iconic brands to the bare minimum. The results are fantastic and represent the kind of branding that always pulls me in. I’d love to see a real-world study on how effective these “minimal-ized” were on the general public (not just designers). Do you think they would do better?
My personal favorite results here have to be Jelly Belly, Nutella, and Guinness.
For some reason I’ve always had Sony radios, I’ve had two my entire life and both were Christmas gifts from relatives. Design-wise they have both stood the test of time; the one I had as a kid still sits in my studio as an artifact of quality ID. But neither are anything compared to the TR-1825. Would love to track one of these down, what a great looking piece. My lifelong fascination with all things Braun/Rams has sometimes left me blind to a lot of the other great ID from the 60s/70s, should probably start doing more research on Sony stuff, they definitely have a great design legacy.
Released in 1970, when Sony had become the first Japanese company to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Sliding the faces on this cubic radio reveals a speaker in front and controls on top, a unique design at the time. One version of its packaging commemorates the World Expo in Osaka, held in March that year, and many expo-goers picked up the radio as a gift. – Sony Product Design History
Atelier Olschinsky shot some beautiful editorial work for Nevertheless Magazine at the 1000KM Red Bull Ring. Love this sort of washed out style, I’d call it cross process but it seems like something else. Really cool technique.
Beautifully designed functional business cards designed by Katharina Hölzl for jazz duo Ritornell. The laser-milled cards play back music when ran through a specially designed music box. Very clever take on the idea of a calling card.
Our friend Missy Livingston, aka Moderna, has put together a burner for your Saturday listening pleasure. Hot For Heat is, in her own words, “An ode to the heat, past, present and future”.
Those of you familiar with midi controller surfaces will know that, by in large, the product design associated with them leaves much to be desired. They are usually garish, overstated affairs seemingly designed to catch the eye of 18 year old ravers passing through Guitar Center. So I was pretty surprised when I saw the new line of Cubase control surfaces from Steinberg. The CMC line of modular controllers allow you to build a control surface using only the modules you deem necessary to your workflow. They even offer a frame to hold up to four modules of your choosing.
Of course, upon seeing these I was immediately reminded of the question I have been asking myself for years: why don’t we as Photoshop users have a system like this? There is something that comes close; the Avid Artist Color, but it isn’t compatible with Photoshop. Can you imagine having a modular system like the CMC that you could customize to run actions, edit color on the fly, manipulate images? Perhaps I’m being a little presumptuous, but I would think a lot of Photoshop users (and creatives in general) could benefit from an open standard for controlling software like Photoshop, Lightroom, and After Effects. The funny thing is that the standard exists already in MIDI, Adobe just needs to implement it and allow us to map controls to functions within their software. I guess after working with music software for so long and having hardware control surfaces as a given, it’s hard to understand why they’ve never made the leap to the world of visual production.
Would you use a hardware controller to work with Photoshop?
Also, here’s a pretty annoying video detailing the CMC system:
Just got home from tour and was pleasantly surprised to see all these nice gig posters from DKNG Studios on GrainEdit. DKNG are apparently the in-house firm for the Troubadour, pretty good gig. Seeing stuff like this (almost) makes me wish I was practicing freelance still. Would be nice to get a spec once in a while for something outside my comfort zone. Bonus: the images are huge! Nice of them to post the high-res versions. You can get the original Gif format ones over at DKNG’s site.
