A new logo has been revealed for series five of the BBC’s Doctor Who.
This is the logo for the new series following the Doctor’s adventures through time and will be part of a new title sequence. The logo is a perfect example of a great concept, perfectly executed. The type is very fitting and the marque – the D and W, combining to create the TARDIS is just beautiful.
Showrunner Steven Moffat said:
“A new logo. The eleventh logo for the eleventh Doctor – those grand old words, Doctor Who, suddenly looking newer than ever. And look at that, something really new – an insignia! DW in TARDIS form! Simple and beautiful, and most important of all, a completely irresistible doodle. I apologise to school notebooks everywhere, because in 2010 that’s what they’re going to be wearing.”
If anyone knows who the logo was designed by please comment below and tell me.
I posted a few months ago about a project I was working on with some friends at uni – ATTN:magazine. When I posted that article the project was still in the early stages of development. We finally got into gear and, as of this week, the ATTN: is live! The website is based on the wordpress overstand theme, created by the guys at Fakeblog. The design is based around the original branding I’d done in June and the site was put together by a guy called Freddie Harrison. I should hopefully be collaborating with Freddie a lot more in future so that’s pretty exciting.
The site is still in a sort of public beta due to lack of content but there is a lot of interest in writing for the site so it shouldn’t take long to remedy that. It’s really exciting to finally see this project get off the ground and I hope it only grows from here.
For this project I worked on a set of social networking icons for the site and I’m really pleased with how these turned out. I incorporated the shape of the logo into each one and think they successfully support the identity as a whole.
The set of four icons are links to get involved with ATTN: on other mediums and I’m very happy with the result.
The site is still in need of some content and I’m sure we’ll be making little changes over the next few weeks so keep checking back and keep an eye out for new content!
I’ve been meaning to write about This Water for some time now but I never got around to it. I finally have a chance to do it and some examples of the packaging too.
This Water is a range of flavoured water drinks, produced by Innocent Drinks, the company behind the Innocent Smoothie brand. They were released in 2007 and are now available in a wide range of shops across the UK.
Good looking and delicious; Innocent's smoothie range
I’m a massive fan of minimalist packaging design and good branding. With This Water, aswell as their smoothie range, Innocent Drinks have executed this combination perfectly.
The This Water range has the same cute, childlike style that the smoothie range has and just like in the smoothies it really works. I knew right away when I saw This Water that the companies were connected. This is a sure sign of successful branding.
The bottles are kept simple with cute illustrations and gorgeous typography. Below are some examples of the bottles and my own pictures comparing the This Water packaging with the Innocent bottles.
This Water was an attempt to rebrand Innocent’s failing water range, which was being neglected becasue focus was put on the smoothie products. A team took the Juicy Water brand and re-invented creating This Water and have been very successful so far. In their words,
“we’re an entrepreneurial bunch that were brave enough to take the innocent brand off our label.”
This Water packaging design
Sales have apparently doubled since launch and they are hoping to launch new recipes and get their product in more stores throughout 2009. This Water are environmentally friendly and they also support Water Aid, a charity which helps provide clean water to third world countries. It’s great when a company can have good morals aswell as a great product and excellent branding.
The drinks come in a variety of flavours each with their own colourscheme and illustration. The bottles look beautiful together and on their own. The company have also started producing glass bottles of This Water for distribution in bars and restaurants.
The lemons and limes flavour
Mangoes and passion fruits flavour
Pomegranates and blackcurrants flavour
Below are some shots I took so you can see the packaging up close. You can also see the similarities between the This Water bottles and those of the smoothies. Both designs are simple and minimalist with very little clutter. The information, on the back for instance, is easy to find and read but still retains the style if the branding.
This water bottles alongside the innocent smoothie packaging
This water and Innocent bottles
The gorgeous This Water bottles. The lid reads "Shake this water up"
Two of the This Water bottle designs
The back of the bottles looks great too
The back of the Innocent bottles is similar
Innocent and This Water bottles together
If you’ve read my “About” page you’ll know I am currently studying Multi-media Journalism at university. My friends and I have been looking for a platform from which we can produce and distribute our own writing. We decided to set up an online magazine which I had the honour of creating the identity for. It’s called ATTN: magazine and is an alternative culture publication. The site itself isn’t set up yet but should be arriving over the next few months. I’m very excited about this project as it should provide a perfect platform for young journalists, including ourselves to present our work to the masses.
Here is the logo I created for the project,
Because the logo is for a magazine I wanted to create a simple, clean logo that wouldn’t draw attention away from the site’s content. I used simple but beautiful typography (helvetica neue) and used the “almost circle” shape to add interest and also to create more of an emblem or insignia. To create a more dynamic identity I decided to punch the letters out of the background shape and place the logo over images. The logo will be seen on the site only with an image behind it. This creates an ever-changing, more interesting identity.
A couple of ideas for this can be seen below,
I think this adds interest to the logo and stops it being too plain. Please comment with views and opinions on my logo and identity design.
I can’t wait for this project to get off the ground and it’s great to be a part of something like this. The site is being run through wordpress, most likely using a modified version of the Overstand theme by Fakeblog. I will be helping in the creation of the site (from an aesthetic point of view mostly because I know next to nothing about coding and creating sites) so I will write an update when designing it gets off the ground.
You can see more of my design portfolio here.
Make sure to keep an eye out for ATTN: magazine in future.
As a designer and design enthusiast I’ve always had a real problem with airline websites. It seems to be a universal rule that they look terrible and have an awful user-experience. A perfect example is the Ryanair website, pictured below. The site is repulsive and incredibly difficult to use, with huge numbers of adverts cluttering up the home page, making finding what you want very hard.
Ryanairs awful website
Numerous other airline websites share this problem. EasyJet’s site is a little more user-friendly than Ryanair’s but it’s no easier on the eye.
easyJet's website
Flybe’s site isn’t much better. It’s amazing how many big companies have below par sites.
The Flybe website has problems too
Even American Airlines can’t get it right. Their site isn’t the worst but it still has massive problems in it’s layout and navigation.
Even an airline as big as American Airlines can't cut it online
However, I recently found new hope when I discovered this beautiful, user-friendly website for Icelandair.
The Icelandair website
The information section on the Icelandair site
The Icelandair website looks great and is really easy to navigate. There are no garish colours or massive adverts and it makes for a much more enjoyable user-experience. The site is laid out using a grid and is neat, tidy and incredibly legible. The use of space is excellent, especially compared to the likes of the American Airlines design with it’s massive cavities. The Icelandair site is also fantastically easy to get around and it’s so simple to find what you want. Ryanair’s site has huge problems in this respect as it is nearly impossibel to navigate and information is practically hidden.
I’ve read about how designers working for big businesses like airlines don’t have the opportunity to create good looking and user-friendly websites because of constraints put on them in the design process but I don’t know enough about their situation to comment. All that aside it’s great to see an airline finally pull it off and come up with a site that looks good and really works.
