As the academic year is starting again we present a competition entry from our vast archives: a logo for a student’s club Chatka Żaka (Student’s Hut).
The identity employs bold, playful colors and combines a hut and a student’s hat into a 3D form created without a single gradient. Yes, 3D without gradients, go figure.
And happy new school year to students.
As kids my brother and I were sent every year to the countryside for a part of holidays and boy, did we hate it. Probably this experience led us to create a sort of absurd board game about the chores and trials of living on a farm, which was nowhere near balanced or fair but gave us tons of fun. Over the years we created one board after another, usually sketching them with a pencil on tattered pieces of paper. We excitedly role-played drunk, lazy countryside crooks, exchanging money cut of old newspapers. We loved that game more than any store-bought shiny ones.
Two years ago R and I re-created the game as a Christmas gift for my brother and for the first time Farmer became designed. We had fun with all the icons and elements and today proudly present the results. (For the record, obviously we don’t think the game is in any way a realistic representation of farm life, nor was it meant to be, so hold off the pitchforks.)
Set of elements: the game board, tokens indicating possession, die and pawns, money and debt markers.
Game in progress, for four players.
Money: heads of animals indicate the value.
Box cover with game elements.
Close-up of the board (from the top left it says: Seeds, Dead Cow, Stealing Horses, Church Help).
Board field: Dead Cow event, you gain $1500 if you bought insurance.
Among other projects we are working on right now is a book that will teach basic ideas of economy to children. However, when we worked on the first layout and concept because of regrettable communication difficulties we were informed that the book is for ages 13-15 while in fact it will be for ages 10-12. This means that most of this project will join the Salon des Refusés and we may only share it with you, not with hordes of children starved for economic knowledge.
The idea was to organize spreads as infographics so that information would be visualized in a graphically simple, easily accessible manner. We used two inspirations additionally to tons of wonderful infographics we collect on our hard drives: Mr Gerd Arntz and FF Dingbats. If you don’t know Gerd Arntz and Isotype be sure to check them out because they were pioneers of our today’s visual language and lots of their work remains exciting and surprisingly current (while, interestingly, also smacks of its own time). And FF Dingbats is a useful dingbats font that we drew from to develop a module of human form.
And here are the drafts. The first spread is about proportions of workers to non-working groups of people and the other about costs of running a small business and the concept of profit.
Even though it’s disappointing we won’t get to work on the project, at least the language is universal enough and we hope to use it as a starting point for some future design.
A while ago we did a series of minimalist Disney posters which looked something like this:
and you can see the big versions here.
Last week we saw the newest pleaser from Disney, Brave, that we’d been waiting since first teaser trailer to see. Or more specifically, since we fell in love with Tangled and wanted to see something else equally exciting. Brave did not disappoint us (though it was surprising to see a Disney princess without a romance) and today we celebrate it with the twenty first minimalist poster.
Now we’re waiting impatiently for more Disney fun.
Today is my birthday and R. gave me (among many other things) a little set of wonderfully illustrated books. They are tourist guides (or really just collections of anecdotes) for four cities that are eternal tourist magnets so that children want to visit and they stay tourist magnets, I suppose. The books were all illustrated and designed by Marianna Oklejak, about whom we wrote a while ago, and we absolutely love the humor of illustrations and the color palettes.
Many images after the jump (or below).
