Color. I look back a few years when I was still in design school. I was an avid Apple fan and almost all designs I created followed that clinical minimalism Apple has always been known for. I designed concept ads, brochures and other new marketing material I could come up with for my classes because it was what inspired me at the time, it really made me feel professional.
Even during my first year of agency experience, I realised I had constant creative arguments with my colleagues because I wanted to design clean looks, with lots of white space, big, thin titles and minimal elements on the page. I used to work in an-in house agency for a newspaper in Peru and they're style was quite different to mine, to say the least. They were more about adding pops of color everywhere they could and filling all the spaces with as much clutter as they could.
I do still believe less is more, naturally, but I think I now understand the true meaning of that phrase. It's not necessarily about have the less elements possible in a composition, it's about having the right ones. Now, I find myself in a different place, I have embraced color in a way that I didn't even think was possible a couple of years ago, and in certain cases I do feel the need to fill white spaces with color. Let's take for example this campaign I designed for noon, where I use red as the dominant color in all compositions, but I'm not shy to introduce splashes - several splashes - of other different colors to make my design take life, stand up and dance with the audience.
If there's one thing I learned from working at noon is to not be afraid of color. Here, I discovered how much more fun a design could be, how much life you can add to a piece of digital art and how this has the power to impact people's lives. Having fun is that one thing I was missing in previous years, I got stuck in the white background, big black titles for too long. I almost led myself to believe that it was my style too, when in fact, it was whatever was imposed to me during my early design school years.
Happiness. For designers, color, of course, is nothing but a way to express feelings. And clearly, the crazy and mixed amount of color I used in this campaign definitely puts a smile on my face. And I think, I certainly hope, it makes anyone that looks at it feel the same way. But this is exactly how this design came to be, it was conceived and designed to convey a feeling, a state of celebration for the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid Al-adha, and logically, my design had to follow that guideline. I also didn't wanna go for the traditional and cliche brown, half moon Arabian design that we're all used to during these holidays, I took a chance here and I let my feelings dictate exactly how the brief made me feel and replicate that in my design.
I feel particularly proud of what I achieved with this campaign, it makes me satisfied every time I look at all the pieces because it really does make me feel happy. It makes me realise that I've come a long way in my design career. I can now see how I'm more able to tackle not only what's required in the brief, but recreate what I can feel as a designer as well, as a human being! I had a lot of fun working on this project, it's one of those jobs that's given me so much satisfaction, not only to conceptualise, but to develop and put it out there for people to appreciate.
This doesn't mean, of course, that I'm not anymore capable of creating that fanatically clean design companies like Apple are known for - style that's still very much appreciated for many people. It means that I've become more versatile, more aware that I can indeed evolve along with the art I create and, more importantly, be honest to my own designs and to myself and be the kind of designer that creates, but also feels.
Do you need a graphic designer? Get in touch today and learn how my data-driven design expertise can solve design-related problems and add value to your business as a result.