Sometimes less is just inappropriate. For instance, when you're designing death-metal logos.

Christophe Szpajdel is the creator of over 7,000(!) logos for black- and death-metal bands. In a recent (though disappointingly sparse) interview in Vice Magazine he reveals that despite his prolific portfolio, the logos don't pay the bills. He works a day job in support of his craft.

I am not a big fan of metal myself, but since I started watching Adult Swim's Metalocalypse, I am intrigued by the metal aesthetic. It's practically the opposite of what most designers aspire towards these days. Death metal logos are often very complex-- practically illegible. They are not at all simple, as we are taught logos and brands should be.

Rather than achieving this complexity through mere repetition, Szpajdel creates it by hand. As a result, it's noisy, but not random in an algorithmic way. Not to say that there is no craft in digital tools or code, it's just that here the craft is expressed differently.

Lastly, each logo belongs to a set. This is most apparent in the first image. There is a consistent vocabulary that makes each logo belong to a recognizable style, and yet this vocabulary is played with such that they are all unique.

That is not to say that most web and UI designers are not building from a consistent vocabulary (often Apple's). But looking over Szpajdel's logos, the contrast between death-metal and web chrome makes me wonder what else we could do with the medium. How could it look and feel different than it does now, instead of always drawing from the same playbook?

This is story about crisps.

Crisps, for non-Anglophiles, are a highly popular British foodstuff similar to American chips. Our flavors seem downright boring when compared to the likes of sausage & ketchup, prawn cocktail, lamb & mint, and Mature Cheddar with Adnams Broadside Beer.

Like most processed food, the size of crisps has shrunk of late. That’s what makes this gesture by crisp-maker Monster Munch so great. Their new version is going back to the old, bigger size.

New Old! Bigger like they used to be.

Ad Blogger Iain Tait writes:

What’s so clever about this is that they’ve tapped into a conversation that’s been going on for decades amongst crisp fanciers. Everyone knows that the old Monster Munch were bigger. They were ‘the biggest snack pennies can buy’. And they had really cool big monsters advertising them. It’s the kind of thing that pops up in those terrible ‘50 reasons why things aren’t as good as they used to be’ nostalgiawank TV shows.

Anyway they’ve made them like they used to be again.

We talk a lot about less around here, but for good things, more is simply better. And as John Maeda says “More is More”.

I think we'd all like to see a little More these days.

I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.

O! Insidious Nostalgia

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:

1. indulge in the thrill of recognition
2. have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
3. be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.

Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.

These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.

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