The Best of BP&O — October 2019
Posted: Filed under: The Best of BP&O | Tags: Branding Agency, Design Blog, Design For Print, Design Inspiration, Design News, Design Opinion, Design Reviews, Graphic Design, Graphic Design Blog, Typography Comments Off on The Best of BP&O — October 2019Selected by Richard Baird.
Five projects that stood out in October and have made it into BP&O’s Best Of Series. Between them, these typically balance a strong singular concept or an appropriate confluence of ideas with a compelling visual character and clear communicative intention that appropriately play with form, colour, type and layout, as well as material, texture, image and print finish.
BP&O, in this end of month review, tries to recognise both the smart use of small budgets—those that channel spending into the most appropriate assets—and those projects with a broad and holistic quality, establishing a continuity (conceptual and/or visual) across multiple touch points. Many of the projects share a concise aesthetic expression, yet there is nuance to these, so do click through and read more about each of these.
Origen México by Blok
Posted: Filed under: Art and Design, Graphic Design Reviews, Publishing | Tags: Book & Magazine Design, Book Design Review, Branding Agency, Canadian Design, Coloured Paper, Design Blog, Design For Print, Design Inspiration, Design News, Design Opinion, Design Reviews, Design Reviews: Editorial Design, Editorial Design, Graphic Design, Graphic Design Blog, Material Thinking, The Best Design for Print 2019, The Very Best of 2019, Typography Comments Off on Origen México by BlokOpinion by Richard Baird
Origen México is a encyclopaedic collection of cultural reference points from Mexico, and an expression of love for its land and identity, edited by Ámbar Editores and Paola Gonzalez Vargas. Written in Spanish it covers things such as, Barro negro pottery; the black clay pottery of Oaxaca, Barrancas del Cobre; the six canyons in the Sierra Madre Occidental and individuals such as pioneering filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón. In its breadth the book has a temporality; a relationship with time. One idea, place, person, piece of pottery or art directly or indirectly informs the another. Layers are built. The present is founded on, but would ultimately find it hard to recognise, all of the past, except that which immediately proceeded it. This is expressed through the materiality of the book, designed by Canadian studio Blok, using a light copy paper and show-through, the relationships and continuity formed with a consistent image treatment and the codifying visual language of consistent type, layout and an encyclopaedic format.
Studio Showcase: Studio Hi Ho
Posted: Filed under: Studio Showcase | Tags: Branding Agency, Design Blog, Design For Print, Design Inspiration, Design News, Design Opinion, Design Reviews, Graphic Design, Graphic Design Blog, Typography Comments Off on Studio Showcase: Studio Hi HoSelected by Richard Baird.
Studio Hi Ho is a Melbourne-based branding and communication consultancy co-founded and led by Wesley Waddell and Patrick Scanlan. BP&O has been following and writing about Studio Hi Ho since 2013 . Their work covers a variety of industries, however, it is their work with property developer Milieu that has often found its way on to BP&O. These projects can be characterised as being both creative and strategic, often visually elegant and nuanced.
Studio Hi Ho’s visual communication work often takes on a similar approach to architectural practice; existing, not only as sales materials, but also as enquiries and interrogations of space, structure, materiality and context. This can be seen in the dual brochure formats for both Nth Fitzroy and Whitlam Place. The former is a sophisticated exploration of the relationship between living structure and neighbourhood, nature, the passing of time and architecture, and the latter, an expression of an extended period of contextual reflection followed by a considered material response.
What marks the studio out is its restraint. Ideas exist both on and below the surface of their material outcomes. This is less about immediacy, and more about intellectual engagement, and an invitation to discover further meaning in materials and finishes and the dialogues formed between seemly independent (but ultimately interrelated) documents.
