Sticker Charts, Vantage Cigs & What Is Going On With Ceiling Fans?
Plus a tip for resizing.
Two Visual Helpers
I saw this group survey here and am putting it into my bag of tricks file. Instead of having to go back and put the information into a design, it designs itself immediately. You can of course make the stickers as silly or serious as you like. But silly is fun.
And this might be something that everybody does, but I'm sharing just in case. If you know this, keep scrolling. But when I need to resize into a bunch of rando sizes, I group by shape and proportion as below. I swear there is a person in a basement office somewhere just pulling two random numbers out of a hat to make new digital sizes.
These were actual sizes for a project, and I typically start with the 4:5 or the 1:1 as a base since it's kind of in the middle. It means that each step out from that has typically minimal adjustments from the previous. Until you get to outliers like the (in this case) vertical or the extreme horizontals. But once you do the first horizontal on the left, the others get a little easier. For way larger or way smaller sizes you have to re-adjust the scale of all the elements. I have probably over thought this, but it's kinda what I do.
A Question About Brand Nostalgia
I was talking with a friend who is around my age and somehow we started talking about what brand of cigarettes I grew up with in my house. Listen, this whole paragraph is going to age me, but I'm really not that old. And I could immediately see the carton of Vantage that both my Dad and Oma smoked. It's really an iconic design. And it made me think of other brands that I associate with growing up or have fond memories of largely because they remind me of a person – Charles Chips, Majic Market, Roses, Hamburger Helper. And I wondered what brands will feel this way to Gen Z? Are there too many brands to be memorable now? Do brands come and go at too fast a rate? Will someone ever feel the way about a Poppi soda that I do about Sprite – the drink with healing powers when you were feeling sick as a kid? I can taste it with saltine crackers right now. Of course, you can't feel nostalgic until time has passed. So I guess we'll wait and see what Urban Outfitters puts on a t-shirt twenty years from now.
Good Reads on the Interwebs
mcmansionhell
Mule Design