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.

Published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1766, Laurence Sterne's comic masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman employs a number of techniques to call attention to the materiality of the text. Here, a blank page is offered to the reader for the purpose of composing his or her own description of Widow Wadman's beauty.

The many literary techniques employed by Sterne (this particular blank page being among the most famous) have been understood to anticipate strategies employed over an incredible expanse of forthcoming novelistic enterprise, forerunning elements in stream of consciousness novels, techniques of post-modernism, and even presaging elements of the Hypertext novel.

Much lesser known, the poem below is called River/sandbank, and it was written by Seiichi Niikuni. I have a great deal of personal sentimental attachment to this poem; I was smitten with it from a very young age, and it remains to my mind one of the great exemplars of poetic restraint.

The character 川 (Kawa) means "river", and 州 (Shū) means "sandbank".

Really rather brilliant isn't it?

In a market (ha!) saturated with "zing! pow! zoom!-esque" design, London-based R Design and IDEO founder Naoto Fukasawa show us the path to cut through the noise, and create powerful, harmonious packaging design with less.

We'll let London-based R-Design speak for their design for Selfridges & Co. products: "...this colour coding of black shines on shelves that traditionally blind us with lurid rainbows. One color. One typeface. One point size. Packaging good enough to eat."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Taking design restraint one step further, the inimitable Naoto Fukasawa never ceases to amaze with this lovely package for banana juice. It is hard to extol this design enough: Fukasawa uses a communicative surface to actually remove the need for any type or graphics whatsoever. Nirvana.

Thanks to our friends at The Dieline Package Design Blog for the heads-up.

In this (first) installment of Less is Better, take a gander with us at a billboard for a South African utility, and a movie poster for Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.

An enormous amount of negative space, clean and simple type, and the clever use of environmental elements make this billboard from South African electricity public utility Eskom, Africa's largest producer of electricity, a shining example in a design field plagued by some of the most flatly unpleasant visual elements of our global visual culture.

This brilliant movie poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey manages to distill an incredible amount of information into a simple black rectangle: The monolith. Compare to these, which look positively garish by comparison.