We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Designing a restrained billboard might be rare, and even culturally antonymic, but when it's done right, it's incredibly effective.

Billboard Advertisement for the Denver Water Public Utility

Here, the Denver Water Public Utility takes the Eskom strategy one step further, actually chopping their billboard down to about 20% of its allotted size. This is not only highly effective because it capitalizes negatively on our perceptual fluency for billboards, but it's also quite apropos to the content. Nicely done.

Billboard Advertisement for the BIC

Secondly, this incredible billboard for BIC razors makes excellent use of many of the principles we at DLB hold dear. Specifically, (1) the aforementioned confounding of perceptually fluent expectations, (2) the Power of Profiles (here, capitalizing on the unique and recognizable shape of the BIC disposable razor), (3) the judicious use of the context/environment of the design, and finally (4) a very interesting (sculptural) complication of the figure-ground relationship.^*

All these excellent factors add up to an almost completely blank billboard. Chew on that.

^* Please note also my near-giddiness that this billboard allows me a second occasion to use the Claes Oldenberg tag.

December is gift-giving time, and if you're not very organized indeed, late November/early December threatens to be characterized not by a pleasant anticipation of quality-time-to-come and a much-needed respite from work and research, but instead by a certain existential dread, or at least a rather more ontic version, most often directed at visions of the mall parking lot.

Being the vigilant (and vigilante) designers we are, Design less better organized in November under the auspices of creating some generative art for the holidays. We especially liked Jer Thorp’s idea of using letterforms as elements in a snowflake, but we wanted to personalize the results. In what even now we have to admit was a brilliant intuitive leap, we thought, "why not use the names of our loved ones? Then we can give them to our loved ones instead of going to the mall."

Once we knew we were making these as gifts, we decided we would digitally fabricate ornaments from our designs. This threw a structural requirement on top of the aesthetic one, but, remembering the mall, we plunged bravely forward.

A detail from a generated snowflake.

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