So in today’s post, I’m going to be making graphic designs better with some small minor changes and we are going to be looking at Nike FedEx Microsoft, and IBM in today’s post.
It’s really great being able to show how a design looks but it’s even more impressive if they can actually experience the design itself as well. as understand how it feels and how it behaves. Learn more about the framer later in today’s post.
So here is our first design which is a kind of an old-school Nike design a blast from the past so to speak.
In today’s post, I’m making the least amount of changes possible just to show how effective they can be. But what would you do to this design and how would you change it to maybe solve a problem or just to make it more effective as a graphic design.
Now you might be thinking well the typography needs changing. But how would you change the typography and what style would you go with. You might be thinking that tom’s just gonna slap on a sans-serif font.
Well in this instance you’d be wrong in thinking that because I’ve gone ahead and used a slab serif typeface instead of a sans serif. So what is my logic here and how does this actually work. Well, we can see that the design is more traditional and it’s more old school and so the designer here has used a serif font. Now I’ve decided to keep things more traditional more retro, but I’ve gone with a slab serif as I think it does keep in with the older style.
But it’s kind of more trendy and more sporty especially with the italics going on here. If we can notice the lines of the model we have some movement, moving across from left to right, and that’s backed up with the Nike logo right here. So that’s why I chose italics and not just a static straight-up kind of typeface for my design. Also, we have some hierarchy in size and also, which I do think works well and better than this here.
Second up today, we have FedEx which is usually. Really great when it comes to branding and just getting themselves out there in a graphic design way. There are a few things niggling at me when I look at this design and I’m sure many of you can see what they are as well. If many people can see them and recognize them then that means there is a common problem that is widely accepted by people who do view this design.
Before we go on I do understand that a lot of time when designers work on a branding project. They’ll be given a color scheme a set of fonts to use and they cannot stray away from that. I understand that and I’ve had that happen to myself many times. But for the purposes of this post, just showing what works. What does not work, I’m not going to limit myself to one specific font. Whatever we’re just demonstrating how a design can look better and how it can be more efficient to the end-user.
So the first problem with this design was the orange text, below the main line of text and this was very difficult to read on a blue background. Yes, it stands out but it’s almost illegible because the colors are too clashy it doesn’t work well together. It’s almost you know it always hurts the eyes to look at. So I did end up going with a more kind of darker color that I sampled from the mountains behind.
Also, the fonts that’s used on the score it with was very very crude and I really didn’t like this font. So I’ve gone with a more standard easier to read and more approachable sans-serif font. Also lastly notice how there’s movement, going up this way and out. If we have the text aligned to the right, the movement is kind of suggestive coming this way.
Which I feel doesn’t work and it’s one of those subtle changes but in the end. I think it makes a big impact as you can see I’ve aligned things to the left and we continue that movement that’s starting here.
Next up we have Microsoft. Which again are usually fairly good when it comes to branding. But this design is, in particular, I have a few issues with. Some things to note is that Microsoft usually carries a lot of this square layout in their branding logos.
As a graphic designer, when you look at it, you will understand exactly what will change and what will not work on this design. I made several changes, but the main thing for me was six.
I understand that these designs are divided into squares and sections. This is too much when you are trying to extract information from the design. I think the idea is great, but I think it would be great if it was understood. So my design I have a section here with these typographic regions. And below I have this section which is going nicely here.
This would be classified as proximity and just balancing things out, also for some contrast and just making things more subtle I’ve reduced the impacts of the one and also the hundred percent. Just to make things a little more accessible and easier on the ice.
But yeah I just felt this one was very busy and just kind of disjointed and I know that was the concept and the idea but I just think it’s been taken too far.
Next up we have IBM and they really dropped the ball on this one I don’t understand what happened here. As you can see I can’t see and you probably can’t read either what’s going on here. You know it just looks wrong, an I don’t know how a designer could end up making something like this.
So of course the first thing I did was went ahead and enlarged the text and also this bit over here. One of the keys and crucial aspects of designing anything is making sure the text is legible. So you can deliver the message and the information successfully. I also wanted to give this word smoother a well a smooth touch, and blend it into the background a little bit more. So it does come across as being smoother, even though it’s not striking in contrast with color. It does make itself stand out from the rest of the text. It just adds more depth to a design.
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