The Brilliant creative team blog

Having moved last April to a new place we have finally finished decorating... phew!

That said the walls needed something, so I set myself the task of filling them. Minimally-detailed was the order and I set to work.

Designing artwork for your living room wall is kind of like designing a personal identity or website for yourself, you have tons of ideas, filter out the good ones, artwork, ?um and ah? over it, artwork again, leave it for a while and come back with fresh eyes, artwork some more, agonize uncontrollably until you?re sitting in front of something you feel you can live with for the foreseeable future.

With the project in full swing I thought I would share some of my hard work. This piece is a drastic rework of a movie poster and one of my favorite films.

As its an ongoing project I will hopefully be updating the series often and might be able to convince the other guys to allow some of them adorn the Brilliant walls!

Unevolved Brands is a showcase of well known logo?s that have been ?Unevolved? by replacing all the elements with circles, keeping only the positioning and palette consistent with the original.

Its a progressive study on brand & logo simplification with more than a few benefiting from the ?Unevolved? touch.

The fact that we are surrounded by these identities all day, every day and also joined with the fact that I myself am a bit of a ?Logo Spotter? found it surprisingly difficult to name more than a handful of the 125 listed. I thought it would be a similar test of visual recognition as reading a sncetene taht kepes the fsirt and lsat lretets of a wrod the smae but jbulems the rset... clearly not.

This is a very cleaver study which I would implore you all to check out.
Unevolved Brands by Graham Smith.

As half the studio are currently expecting I thought that this amazing animation called ?Genese? by Ramos David depicting conception through to birth in a ?Right here, Right now? homage stylee, to be rather appropriate.

It really is a beautiful piece of work on a rather gross journey and certainly worth five minutes of your time.

Whilst flicking through a news article about website design and user friendly interfaces I came across a term I had not heard of before ?false simplicity?. After reading up on it a little more it seems that false simplicity is a relatively new term and put very simply refers to minimalism taken too far!

As designers we are constantly striving for clean, great looking and easily navigatable interfaces with an aim to increase user-friendliness but are we in danger of making the features so simple and minimalistic that their functions become cryptic?

There are a few items on the list that fall under the ?false simplicity? moniker:

- Icons as links with no supporting text or no supporting visual indication.
- Symbolic representations of large or vague ideas that would be better explained in text.
- Minimal (or even zero) text.
- Interfaces so ?clean? that it?s hard to find the menu bar or other options.
- Reliance on mouse-over descriptions to convey what buttons do.

False simplicity is particularly insidious for designers because it?s hard for them to see. A cryptic GUI can make perfect sense to the designer, who knows everything about how it works already, while completely stumping everyone else.

Simplicity is the ideal middle ground maintaining a healthy balance between minimalism and robust features.

... so there you have it ?false simplicity?, feel like you have learnt something new today?

I received my copy of Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts yesterday and although i only had time for a flick through I was immediately impressed.

You can tell how much time and thought has been put into the book straight away and it is absolutely packed with great designs and stories of the designs and the artists as well as documenting the history of Threadless.

Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts is broken up with a huge collection of images but not something that requires only half an hour of your attention which is a plus point in my, er... book.

If you love tee design culture, great illustration and awesome detail then you should give this one some time, it truly is an inspirational book.

My first blog post of the new year and to be honest, it?s a good one!

This is the work of Cheong-ah Hwang, a Korean based artist who takes the paper and card I would normally use to draw on, print on or mock up with and turns it into amazing multi-layered pieces of artwork. Its not just the technique she applies to her work that is impressive but the sheer amount of detail that goes into each piece.

You can check out more of her work on her Flickr page.