122 - My Favourite Kind Of Design - Part 1 - Graphic Design

What this episode covers

Ian Moss asked me a question I just had to answer: what's your favourite kind of design? Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode Follow An Ar Christ Rabbit by Fields Ohio Neon Hippies by Fields Ohio Wolf Dunes by Fields Ohio Line-by-line notes I was asked by Ian Moss Quite a long time ago now Sorry Ian What my favourite piece of design is And what areas, such as communication, graphic design, architecture This is new for this format of AADA Because I’ve never answered somebody’s question before But Ian is a good friend, and it’s a good question So I’m going to do my best to answer it Let’s give it a try. This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess MUSIC There’s two things I remember distinctly when I first started realising I was into design One of them I only realised retrospectively And the second one was my first love of graphic design The retrospective one is something I’ve spoken about way back in episode 81, the design disease I mentioned the WWF logo, the World Wrestling Federation At the time in my teens, I was mega into wrestling And I used to love reproducing their logo with a marker pen over and over It was the only logo I could draw, so I went nuts with it I got pretty good at drawing it too actually Looking back at this now, I wonder if the WWF—now WWE made their logo like that on purpose The two things I’ve long since had in my head about logo design Is it should be simple enough so anybody can draw it And it should be able to fit on a postage stamp The WWF logo did both of those things And it was accessible It wasn’t a great logo from any technical standpoint But it fit the bill, it fit the kind of audience they wanted to attract And it meant young teenagers like me could draw it easily and spread their message Logos have long since been a favourite part of design for me They are the perfect distilled version of graphic design It takes so much skill to create something that looks so simple And it’s why I’m constantly fascinated with logos It’s my favourite part of design to produce, and admire And as for my favourite logos I’m probably a bit predictable here I love Coca Cola’s logo, not just because it looks nice, but because they’ve had the balls to stick with it And whilst I’m not a big fan of Apple as a business or company anymore, their logo through the ages and today is just perfect I also have a soft spot for the new Juventus FC logo, but that’s probably because I’m not a football fan and I like that it looks different to every other football logo The second thing I adored then I first started in design Was everything that The Designers Republic did As a kid, I got the original Playstation with Wipeout for christmas And back then I used to love looking through the manuals after I got the game Some game companies put effort into these manuals And this was a game that put a lot of effort into the manual Not only that, the case was so nice All the graphics and artwork was—to my young eyes—just so cool Even looking back at it now Some 22 years later It still looks so cool In their hey day, that’s what The Designers Republic were really good at Making things just look so damn cool Designers are usually pretty good at making stuff look cool But The Designers Republic went a step further than that Everything they touched, from video games to coke bottles to record sleeves All just looked so cool It’s a style these days that has been emulated endlessly But some of the originals who worked there Like Michael C Place Still create really cool looking stuff to this day I’m nearly out of time for this episode And I have to put a time limit on this because I could gush for days about my favourite design But I just quickly wanted to mention one final thing I love Wit Wit in any form of design, and here I mean clever design I just love in any medium Maybe I’ll expand on this on a future episode MUSIC...