Sometimes reaching back catapults you forward. I grabbed Design Dialogues by Steven Heller and Elinor Pettit off my studio bookshelf and started reading for inspiration. And, I got it. What I came across were sage tid bits that poked my brain as a designer.
“One should be able to design anything from a spoon to a city.” This is attributed to Adolf Loos (an Austrian architect influential in European Modern Architecture). I love this! I’ve always maintained that good design is good design and why not bring those same skills and talents into multiple areas. Whether creating a garden, developing a logo, laying out a magazine, or designing a product certain principles and aesthetics apply.
Massimo Vignelli responds to a question on Rational Design in Design Dialogues and states the following, “There are two kinds of graphic designers: One is rooted in history and semiotics and problem solving. The other is more rooted in the liberal arts — painting, figurative arts, advertising, trends, and fashion. These are really two different avenues. The first kind is more interested in looking to the nature of the problem and organizing information. That’s our kind of graphic design. To me, graphic design is the organization of information. The other kind is interested in the look and wants to change things all the time. It wants to be up-do-date, beautiful, trendy. David Carson is a perfect example of the other kind. I have tremendous respect for guys like Carson…one side is the structured side, the other is the emotional side.”
I fall in the middle – a liberal, emotional problem solver. With my background in advertising in the Journalism College and later studying graphic design at an art school married with my passion for photography, I’m inspired and motivated by visual beauty which is balanced by my love of words, my over working mind and rebellious Aquarian nature. In essence, designers are influenced by their studies, their experiences, their surroundings and their guts (their souls, if you will).
All this hashing around of ideas leads me to my having to design in a very, very, very small space. A cigar band. You get about an inch in surface area to entice the consumer, brand the product, wrap the product, etc. Talk about a compact message. Attached is an example of the Cuvée bands I designed for Cusano Cigars — this happens to be a premium cigar, which required an elegant treatment of typography, simple elegant lines (cross hatching in background), symbols that are regal (embossed star), colors which expressed the name and product, etc. It’s both fun and challenge to solve this “problem” for an excellent, great tasting cigar.
