Don't Miss This vol. 1

For this category, I'll be following Eye Magazine's design blog and regularly commenting on their content. What caught my eye this week, pun not intended (because puns are lazy), was their commentary on the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games logo. I might still be bitter that Rio inexplicably beat out Chicago (my hometown) for the 2016 games, but I tend to agree with Eye's analysis. They call it "so nondescript that it's difficult to concentrate on it long enough to form an opinion."

The problem is that it could be a logo for any number of companies and uses no form of visual shorthand to suggest the vibrant culture of the city, country and continent. If anything, it's simply reflective of the state of logos in general. Many logos are being redesigned in a more complicated, computer-display friendly style that detracts from the simple beauty and graphic nature of earlier logos intended largely for print media (Given my work in custom publishing at the university bookstore, the Xerox logo change comes to mind immediately as an example of this).

In addition to Eye, I'll also be looking at various items of note that strike my design fancy. Being obsessed with film and especially movie posters, Polish movie posters are something that I have always found totally fascinating. By and large, American movie posters have degenerated into a soulless money-grab where there's little artistic style and more about the immediate conveyance of genre and names rather than the content of the movie. (Iron Man comes to mind.) All that said, Polish movie posters continue to amaze me. The website where I most frequently ogle these advertising marvels is www.polishposter.com, where they feature several different artists with wholly unique styles. The example on the right is for one of my favorite movies, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The visual style is a wholesale departure from the yellow typographic design of the original poster, which I also love but is considerably less indicative of the movie's content (in my opinion).