It's a Material World

Material Design 3 is the sophisticated underlying design scheme / language / science that underlies Google’s massive presence on the web. It deals with typefaces, colour schemes, icons, accessibility, navigation and more, and has a very large number of moving parts, including an interesting new colour model.

“Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design. Backed by open-source code, Material streamlines collaboration between designers and developers, and helps teams quickly build beautiful products.”

— Material website

Go Go Logos

Logos continue to evolve apace in the mainly digital design world. Some attractive trends, some pretty ugly, as showcased here.

“Modern culture continues to shift the ways we interpret symbols and how we visually prioritize in context, setting topsy-turvy the relationship between identity and application. Greater credence has been given the attending visual vocabulary as texture, pattern, typography, photography and illustrative elements have shifted seats in the visual brand hierarchy. It’s becoming more common to see a brand driven by the supporting visual aesthetics, occasionally leaving the logo to call shotgun if it’s invited along for the ride at all.”

Tales of Mice and Men — Book Cover Design

Les Pobijie writes of a vanishing world — a small Australian town with an actual functioning newspaper. The tone of his novel is broad farce, with many mishaps and misunderstandings in store for the callow young journalist at the centre of the story. We combined a masked gunman, explosion, an authentic NSW pub and the intrepid hero. The typeface for the title and author name is Thunderhouse.

Funny Mistakes — Book Cover

The Funny Dictionary (published by the National Library of Australia) makes gentle sport of inadvertently amusing definitions written by children. Some of the "howlers" are accompanied by thematically aligned images from the extensive National Library photographic archives. The cover below was selected from many options generated by Working Type Design. The book is due for publication in the first half of 2018.

Classical Poetry — Book Cover Design

James Martin writes expressive classical poetry about the human condition. His latest book contains 400 poems dealing with life, love, faith and philosophy. Corregio's Jupiter and Io seemed perfect as the cover for this volume. The title typeface is Linotype Didot.