Vast - Music For People

This is the album cover for "Music for People" by the band Vast.

Ever since I first saw this album in the year 2000 I was not only impressed by the music but also the design of the cover and the typography. I find the image on the cd cover of the flower and the snake to be quite powerful, snakes are sometimes seen as quite evil creatures while flowers are seen to be beautiful so seeing them both together is quite a contrast.

The designs function i so portray the music, which I think it has done successfully. Vast's music is a mixture of quite heavy rock and ambient strings,  so the image of the snake and flower seems to be i visual example of this noise.

I originally saw the album in a cd store and I decided to buy having known how fantastic Vast's music is. 

The album cover is well designed with the simplicity and the colour of the typography. Im a huge fan of the typography behind "Vast." I love how parts of each letter isn't visible yet it can still be easily read, this has fascinated me since I first saw it. It is my most influential form of typography to me. I was attracted to the piece because of the music and the great typography.

Mining (Heroic Realism)

Every time I look at design which has the Heroic Realism style, I have a quiet chuckle to myself. I just guess I see the Heroic Realism style as really corny because it portrays an unrealistic, over exaggerated way of communicating to the public. At first glance, when I look at this design I see some arrogant miner who sees himself better then everyone else. But taking into consideration the aspect of having the miner faceless gives the impression that the miner "can be you." The radiating light behind the miner helps support the miner being a hero as such which enforces the company being the "Top Gun in Mining."

The ad is for the mining tools company known as C.R. Kennedy. Which actually took me a while to figure out by looking at this design. The badge on the helmet states the companies name, or the end of the text. Originally I thought this ad was advertising a mine site, but it is actually for tools and surveying, so the design has failed on that sense. I don't like how the design has used lots of little arial photos of multiple mines as the background, to me it looks quite cheap. The silhouette of the miner, I believe is the only good design in this advertisement, because of its simplicity, and how it is still easily recognisable. The typography is quite easily read with the slab serifs, and the colours are chosen well with it working well with the colour of the helmet.

I originally saw this advertisement in an Australian Mining magazine. 

Kill Bill

This is an advertisement for the movie Kill Bill 2. 

I thought this advertisement is fantastic how it literally thinks outside the square.

As gory as it seems i think to blood splatter is really effective because Kill Bill is quite a gory film.

Its function to to make viewers actually want to see the movie. People who are a fan of Quentin Tarantino's movies would appreciate this ad because of his gory style in his film making.

I saw it on the website "www.inspirationroom.com.

The style is quite out there, how the blood flies off the advertisement and over the street. Unfortunately i can't see the typography but  it uses the 1/3 rule with lots of white space around it.

I was attracted to the piece because I like the movie and appreciate how the designer of this ad really thought outside of the square.

EGG!

Who couldn't love these eggs? To open your fridge everyday to see a bunch of lovely eggs smiling up at you is just one of those finer pleasures of life.  Yup its sad.

But I think its fantastic, its certainly appeals to a family like audience, because Im sure little kids would love seeing all these little eggs with their healthy green smiles.

Its function is to see eggs, and I believe it is successful at that, because as we all know, if the eggs are happy, the chickens are happy!

I saw it one day in woolies on my grocery run.

The design is quite nice, has a farmy type  style, and the egg on the front has a piece of grain hanging out of its mouth which implies that they are grain fed. The typography looks like a nice quick handwritten style.

I believe its quite high quality, because I have never known and egg company to be so successful in the design area.

The smiley face on the egg is was attracted me to the design.

Sony Bravia Ad

Copy this link to watch the clip as is doesn't seem to work at tafe------ http://www.sony.com.au/article.jsp?id=3649#watchBravia at 1/3/09 at 1452

then click on the large "bravia" word on the left, and select "watch bravia drome"

This is an ad for a new 200 hertz television by Sony.
I think its a fantastic ad because it uses the style of the first motion animation and encorporates it into the latest technology in television, and also I enjoyed watching the ad because Kaka is such a great football player.
The purpose of the ad is to enforce the smoothness of the rate the new Bravia screen refreshes.
I saw it on SBS one morning when I was watching Champions League Football, so I suppose that was the ideal time to put it on the television.
I quite like the choice of colours and the cinematography used in the ad, the metallic red really showed the modern side of the dome. The cimematography helped show what the dome is doing and also the emotion coming from the crowd.
The dome cost over 40 million to make, but i belive Sony will make the money back in sales no problem with this successful ad.
I was attracted to the piece because of the football theme to it and the music, but until i realised what the significance of the dome was, I really appreciated it more.

recieved from
http://www.sony.com.au/article.jsp?id=3649#watchBravia at 1/3/09 at 1452

Coles Tomato Sauce

I hate this label.

well mainly Coles' idea of having people on their products telling you how great or what they like to do with the product of which they have their irritating face on. 

It's meant to be a tomato sauce bottle label, and the tomatoes next to the person are a give away. The function of the design on the label  is to get people to like the tomato sauce, but i feel thay fail to achieve that by plonking the "you'll love" before "Coles' Tomato Sauce." I dont need the company to tell me what im going to love or not. Then my eyes scroll down to some person telling me what they like to do with the product or how they like it, what I really want to know is if the product is good or not. And the only way im going to find out if it is tasty or not, which is why Coles' designer should just make the label look tasty, not irritating. I saw it in Cole's down the sauces isle (funny that!) 

As much as I dont want to point out anything good about this design, I think the typography is good, its a nice sans serif typeface which is quite easy to read. And i suppose the colours do work well, its just hard to notich these nice parts of the design when some lady is standing in the way showing you her chips.

Quality?  Crap! 

The really irritatingness of the design is what attracted me to it

Power, Corruption & Lies

               1890

Fantin-Latour, Ignace-Henrei-Theodore

Power Corruption, & Lies, 1980, Peter Saville, New Order

The cd cover of New Order's second album, Power Corruption, & Lies is designed, by yet again, my favourite Graphic Designer, Peter Saville.

I may be biased towards the cover because of New Order being one of my favourite bands. The painting on this cover is a reproduction of a painting, "A Basket of Roses" painted by a French artist known as Henri Fantin-Latour. The colours in the top right hand corner of the cd cover is a colour-based codes which says the band's name. The same code is used on a number of New Order's cds.

I first saw the design when my brother bought me the cd for my birthday a number of years ago. No typography is used in this design whatsoever. I see the design of being very high quality with the meaning behind the code-based colours to represent the bands name. I am attracted to the piece because i really appreciated how Peter Saville used the an 1890 painting in the art work and the unique way to express the bands name and of course its also because I love the band, and the designer.