Gallery: For Something Simple, Minimal Design Sure Is Complicated
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*MIN: The New Simplicity in Graphic Design* is all about the inventive, expressive ways designers today are using understated graphics. For L’eaundry, a fancy laundry detergent sold from a food cooperative in Hamburg, Korefe design agency used a black-and-white silhouette design to show that this soap is as luxurious as perfume.
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Riposte is a women's magazine out of London. The cover design is unusual: it only features type, with a photograph of the "cover girl" on the back page. In the book, Shaz Madani, the art director, explains: "The type-only cover reflects our desire to make sure the women featured are not judged or represented by just their looks, but instead celebrated for their ideas and achievements. It was a purposeful departure from the image-obsessed magazine world. So its minimal design is more functional than aesthetic, but has become an important part of our visual identity."
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Plenty of the work in the book feels like an antidote to some of the hyper, extreme designs we've become used to. The Gentlewoman, a beautiful magazine that launched in 2010, could be seen as a reaction to the exclamatory neon layouts found in other women’s periodicals like *Cosmopolitan* or Glamour.
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Harmonian is a line of food products from Athens, Greece, that come in stark, all-white packaging by the firm Mousegraphics. Cut-outs let consumers see the actual food, letting the product sell itself.
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For the 50th anniversary of the publication of A Clockwork Orange, Penguin commissioned Jonathan Barnbrook to reimagine David Pelham's famous cover, featuring a cartoon of a man with a mechanical gear for an eye. Barnbrook put a big orange circle on a white book jacket. It's easy to look at the cover, Tolley says, and criticize it for not being anything more complex than a circle. "If you were given a brief to redesign A Clockwork Orange, the amount of visual references, and the really famous book design that’s been done already---it’s almost an impossible brief," says Stuart Tolley, author of *MIN*. In this case, simplicity isn't a cop out; it's a high-stakes bet that one orange circle can be the face of an entire novel.
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Continuous Tone is a new sound project by London-based creative group Open Editions. These are compositions of environmental sounds recorded in the French countryside.
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*New Philosopher* is an independent quarterly magazine from Australia. It covers relatively abstract topics, like the mind, the self, health, growth or happiness. The geometric covers help to illustrate those ideas specifically, but in a way that could be understood across cultures.
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*City by Landscape* is a series of essays about the German architect Rainer Schmidt. The book's cover features little more than a scattering of sans serif letters, but does so in an artfully arranged way.
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One section of *MIN* is devoted to production, in which the character of the work comes from the tactile quality of print, rather than graphic design elements. Imprimerie du Marais, a Parisian printing house, created a series of distinct notebooks by using texture, rather than color or shapes.
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Imprimerie du Marais's notebooks, all stacked together in one---yes---simple box.
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For the Pet Shop Boys's 12th studio album, London design studio Farrow created a zig-zag design that hints at the *Electric* album title and reflects the band’s dance- orientated approach to music production.
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This design approach even works on mundane objects. The Japanese brand Askul carries batteries with no design other than a color and a number that connotes the size.
