The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Here are some examples of what I regard as good and bad designs.

The Good

It's hard to choose a single poster from Black Swan's variety of gorgeous posters. The retro, Soviet propaganda-esque feel, with the beautiful use of color and regular alignment, makes this poster my favorite. The visual concept is clever and ties in with the theme of the film.

Best movie poster of all time? I think so. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Alien marketing campaign generated the massive amount of buzz that it did. This layout is a perfect balance of letting the title and primary image speak for themselves. With only two photo elements and a simple tagline, the minimalist design leaves the viewer with a feeling of discomfort, imagining the horrors that lie within the hatching egg visual. It gives the viewer an idea of the terror implied but doesn't paint the whole canvas (and one's own imagination is often much scarier than movie monsters). The spacing between the "A L I E N" lettering is utterly slick and reflects the isolation the characters find themselves in in the middle of black space.

Someone was reading this book in the subway across from me and I was sort of surprised that this sleek design belongs to a Steve Martin book. The layout, typeface are strong but simple, and the artwork half-visible through the lettering pulls you in and makes you want to see more.

This is a site by a web designer friend of mine, Kelli Anderson, who I really admire for tasteful and minimal layouts. Everything she designs has this elegant but bold feel, particularly with her choices of fonts and colors, that I'm insanely jealous of. The circle motif works well and balances the overall feel of the design. The left - right - left positioning of the circular visuals break the regularity of the layout but just enough to keep it visually interesting and not irregular-feeling.

Ok so it's maybe a bit unusual to admire a cereal box design, but I went over each design in the cereal aisle and was determined to find a strong design. This one and Cheerios stood out as simple, bold and give off a fresh, tasty visual feel. I think one of the things that attracts me to this cereal box is the graphic feel of the design and its restraint - most other boxes had around 15 element but here they've whittled them down to just a few, making it more impactful.

The Bad and the Ugly

If you ever find yourself in a bookstore scouring for bad designs, go directly to the romance section. Wow. It doesn't seem like this image was made to have text overlaid on top of it. I don't understand why there are three different fonts that seem to have nothing to do with one another, or why the quotes are so misaligned. The font color choice is pretty bad too as it doesn't seem to have much to do with the illustration or concept of the book. This feels so crowded yet there are only a few different text elements.

There's a lot of bad designs in the supermarket but this one took the prize. It's difficult to nail down exactly why this label is so ugly but maybe it comes down to taste. The colors are bright and non-complementary, the gradient yellow background does not feel fresh at all and the cartoony style of the Walker's font and apple illustration go a bit overboard in their cuteness.

God knows why I bought this soap - it certainly wasn't because of the label design. I just don't understand the color combination or why they've found the need to slap about 5 incongruent fonts on a relatively small label. The honey-esque background feels cheap, and the shadow on the gold "Liquid" isn't doing great things for the label. I think the shadow is there because the gold and honey background are too alike in color, but it begs the question why gold was chosen?

I found this gem of an ad in a newspaper back home. Maybe it's unfair to pick on an obviously amateur design but there's so many things wrong here. First of all, if you're making an ad for publication, Arial and Times New Roman are probably not the best way to go. The alignment makes absolutely no sense, the logo is in the corner while the rest of the design elements are scattered here and there around the photograph. I'll give them credit for reflecting the color palette of the logo in the headline and emphasis text, but the logo is so bad that they may have been better off leaving it alone. The tiny text in the bottom right corner is obviously slapped on there as an afterthought. Yikes. Let the designers do the designing!

Since I picked a cereal box for the "Best" category I may as well post the design that I found the least appealing in the cereal aisle. Once again incongruent colors and an array of badly selected fonts are the downfall of this design. The glowing background from the sun element cheapens the feel of the design. The whole design conveys the opposite of tasty and fresh to me, which a cereal box should probably do. Oh also, and this is not relevant to the design, but why do I need 3 different kinds of raisins?