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Neon Museum in Warsaw

When we think about neon signs we think Las Vegas. Did you know Poland also has an amazing collection of neon signs?

The Neon Museum gathers some of the best post-war neon signs and displays. Neon signs used to be very popular in Poland and other post-soviet countries. The collection gathers over a 100 neon pieces. The purpose of the museum is also to renovate neon signs and cultivate the design awareness. This collection is a great example of how light, color and typography can work effectively together.

Minimalist design

A minimal brand mark can be incredibly useful when it comes to creating a brand identity. Embracing minimalism in no way means that your design has to be any less creative. Below I’m including minimalistic yet very beautiful design examples in visual communication.

Dunkin’ drops ‘Donuts’ in recent rebrand

Dunkin’ Donuts wants you to know they sell more than just donuts. The coffee and baked goods chain tried to remedy this in early 2000, when they added a coffee cup icon to the logo. And last week, they took an even more drastic step, unveiling updated branding and a new name: Dunkin’. That’s right—just Dunkin’.

Let’s take a look at their new branding.

Color schemes used throughout 12 distinct eras in history.

The Color Leap app provides you with the ability to click on an era and find out about the most popular colors of the time. Not only does the app list the colors, but it also explains why those colors were in such heavy use. Some of the available eras include 2,000 BC and the ancient Egyptians, the year 0, 1,000 AD and every 100 years until the 1800s. Starting with the 1900s, the breakdown of color popularity and name takes place by decade.

Beautiful illustrations from Emilia Dziubak

Beautiful color schemes to inspire

1. Modern and clean

2. Muted Tones

3. Art History inspired

4. Fun and Professional

BBC 2 rebrands

After 20 years, BBC 2 has decided to rebrand. The new look is centered around a set of 16 new idents for broadcast and digital use, which do away with the previous theme of recreating the number “2” in different forms and materials.

Apple made custom logos for it’s October event

Apple has officially announced an event on October 30th where the company is expected to announce a new bezel-less iPad Pro and possibly some updated MacBooks. But unlike its usual event invitations, this year, Apple has done something different: it created tons of unique, colorful versions of its logo, and everyone seemingly received a different style on their invitation.

Vibrant app design

Contrast worksheet

How Sans Forgetica helps you remember everything

Sans Forgetica is a typeface that has been scientifically designed to aid memory retention. It was designed by a multidisciplinary team of academics.

Entire hunks of each character are left off the page, giving them a slightly disjointed or haphazard appearance. The font also back-slants, or leans to the left.

The font was developed using a learning principle called ‘desirable difficulty’, where an obstruction is added to the learning process that requires us to put in just enough effort, leading to better memory retention to promote deeper cognitive processing.

Sans Forgetica is available free to download as a font and Chrome browser extension at sansforgetica.rmit.

Introducing multilocalism: one of the visual trends of the year

Adobe recently introduced Multilocalism as their third visual trend of the year. So what is multilocalism?

If you’re born in one country, to parents born in two other countries, and then move multiple times from one country to another, what do you say when someone asks, “Where are you from?” That’s the question Taiye Selasie asks in her TED Talk, “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, Ask Me Where I’m Local.” She concludes that the better question is really about where your rituals, relationships, and circumstances make you feel at home: “My experience is where I’m from,” she says. For Taiye, her truest answer is multilocal. She’s local to Accra, Berlin, Rome, New York, and New Delhi.

Technology, travel, and migration are shrinking the world and strengthening our connections with each other. As we flow between cultural and geographic boundaries, more of us are embracing our complex global identities, deepening our awareness across cultures, and seeking authentic, local moments.

Multilocalism means places where we feel like locals, which are close to us and create a sense of home, of belonging. The interesting part: these places may not even match the place where we were born, grew up, spent much of our lives. In fact, the time spent in there does not matter.

For designers and brands, the multilocal trend requires striking a delicate balance. Images need to embrace true, local moments without appropriating them, and to celebrate the local while elevating our shared global connections.

AI, Visual Search and Retail’s Next Big Step

Imagine walking into your favorite clothing store to purchase a new outfit. Rather than combing the shelves, digging through the clearance section, or checking the tags on mannequins, you walk up to a computer that recognizes you and you input what you’re looking for — “outfit for summer.”

Using the data from your previous purchases, inventory available at the store, and current fashion trends, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm puts together several outfit options for you to choose from. With minimal effort, you find clothing perfectly suited to your taste and needs.

In 2018 we expect to see more examples of how companies can deploy AI to redefine interactions and engagement with their customers. Customer relationship management is one of the next frontiers for AI, with early adopters focusing on improving customer insights through enriched data, opportunity stage recommendations, and dynamic pricing capabilities. In the online world, companies including Burberry and Tommy Hilfiger use chatbots, which enable 24/7 engagement with customers. AI can help improve offline engagement as well. Companies can, for example, use it to evaluate sensor-collected data and improve in-store experiences for target customers.

One good example is Farfetch’s “Store of the Future.” Automatic customer recognition at the store’s entrance, RFID-enabled clothing racks and digital mirrors that allow customers to choose sizes, colors and directly check out, all demonstrate how AI can be employed to excite customers in-store while seamlessly integrating the online and offline experiences.

AI can not only deliver competitive advantages to early adopters; it has the potential to disrupt the fashion industry entirely. Research on early adopters suggests that AI-driven innovation will be a new source of productivity and may further expand the income gap between high-performing firms and their competitors. Demand projection is a particularly interesting area due to the trend-driven nature of fashion. An AI-based approach for demand projection could reduce forecasting errors by up to 50 percent, while overall inventory reductions of 20 to 50 percent are feasible. To turn AI into a source of competitive advantage, fashion players should develop a compelling AI strategy. There is a broad array of possible use cases and technologies, often requiring different capabilities. Fashion companies need to focus on the areas that deliver the most value and best support their business strategy.

Material design - now easier to customize.

Yesterday at Google I/O, the company has revealed some major changes to Material Design through the use of a new tool appropriately dubbed “Material Theming”. Material Theming will make use of the prototyping application known as Sketch as a plugin, allowing you to design material design interfaces while introducing a huge amount of variety into your creations. You can do lots of different things simply through the use of different tools and sliders within the program, such as creating new buttons and applying custom colors to any UI element that you wish.

Google isn’t making any major changes to the overall design language, but it is making it easier for developers to adapt Material Design to their own projects, and two of today’s launches focus solely on this. The first is Material Theming, that is, the ability to make a small change to say the color or typography and have that applied across the theme.

Material Theming in Material Design is brought to life with the all-new “Theme Editor” which allows developers to unify design across applications. It does this by giving devs an interface to create specific themes which can then be exported and integrated into the design process. This allows users to apply global changes throughout their entire design library.

And that’s not to mention the ease of use. One of the biggest deterrents to using material design was its difficulty to implement – it’s hard to remain consistent when many different developers will all have their own take on how they want to design their application. It’s no longer a set of rules that developers have to follow, but a flexible set of guidelines that will allow developers to design their applications how they want, while also avoiding the monotonous nature of how Android has become.

The real highlight of the release may be Material Gallery, though. “Now anyone can use Material Gallery to review and comment on design iterations,” the Material Design team writes today. It’s the same tool that Google designers have used for years to collaborate on designs in-house, and now it’s out of beta and open to all.” The Gallery tool lets designers comment on their colleagues’ designs, no matter whether that’s an image or a video frame.

https://material.io/tools/theme-editor/

Best brand redesigns

Branding goes way beyond just a logo or graphic element. When you think about your brand, you really want to think about your entire customer experience…everything from your logo, your website, your social media experiences, the way you answer the phone, to the way your customers experience your staff.

When you look at this broad definition of branding, it can be a bit overwhelming to think about what is involved in your brand. In short, your brand is the way your customer perceives you.

Let’s take a look at some of the best brand redesigns.

Visa is one of the biggest players in global digital payments and this logo redesign is telling me that even the big players can get it wrong. I am lost as to what was the real need for this redesign.

Facebook. Facebook’s first focus on college communities was pretty modest when we compare it to the current number of users. Now, Facebook’s redesigned website is clear, plain and intuitive. They don’t have to explain the benefits of joining the community and don’t bother visitors with too much info about their services. Facebook did push out a small change to it's of the logo when it decided to eliminate the light blue line at the bottom of its previous logo.

AirBnb. When Airbnb rebranded, it was very controversial both inside and outside of the design world. But as with many logo redesigns, after some time has passed, it's easy to look back and see that they made the right decisions. They’ve rebranded the identity by simplifying the logo from words to just an icon, eliminating language barriers and making it universally recognizable. By incorporating a large palette of colors and a variety of photography styles, any culture or country can now identify with the Airbnb brand.

Instagram. Instagram has a wordmark logo nd the new redesign has a smoother and more fluid look to it.They’ve replaced the logo typography as well as the icon and turned it into a simplistic yet very striking form.

Why design systems are a real game changer?

You’ve probably heard or at some point created brand guidelines for your website. You might be wondering why do you need design system?

Before we get this let’s talk about what the design system is. Design system is a library of components that can be reused in different variations. Design systems will work well on a mobile as well as a website. With a design system, you can build bridges between design and development teams.

Why you should start using a design system?

• it eliminates inconsistencies

• it speeds up Your Process

• it makes your Customers’ Lives Easier

You might be asking what’s the difference between the design system and style guides.

Design System is the complete set of design standards, documentation, and principles such as UI patterns and code snippets.

Design System includes pattern Library – A subclass in the design system, this is the set of design patterns for use across a company.

The style guide is basically a subclass of the design system. It’s the documentation which describes the design system itself: how products should look and feel, use cases for UI patterns, correct typographic scales, etc.

But what does a website look and feel like when it’s built with a design system? Actually, it performs better as we don’t use unwanted snippets of code and it’s easier to follow.

With design systems, you create cleaner code and beautiful elements faster than ever before. Some of the biggest players have launched their own design systems and made it public for free.

Airbnb recently launched their design system. https://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/

Other companies who have launched their design systems: Salesforce Lightning Design System, Invision, UXPin, Shopify. I highly recommend checking them out and experimenting with them.

You can also create your very own design system and apply it to your next website. This can speed up dramatically the process of development.

How to create your own design system? There are lots of rules but I’m going to talk about a few.

1.Start by creating the UI inventory. List and describe all of the design patterns currently used in your interface and note the inconsistencies.

2.Create design principles: Codify your practices. Code the UI elements and start working on the style guide for the design system.

3.Build the color palette: Look for duplicated shades of color and use only colors that are necessary. Create the palette and its naming convention.

4. Build the typography of your design system. Think about a responsive solution that can easily translate on any device. You fonts should look good whether it’s a desktop or a mobile application. When you’re creating fonts rules for your styling classes consider not only size of the font, but also weight, line-height, and other properties.

I hope this article will give you a good introduction to design systems.

Motion in User Interface

The animation is already playing an important role in the user interface, design. The purpose of the motion is no longer to create flashy and meaningless animations. These days are gone.

Now with motion, we can enrich the user experience and create a functional tool that makes interactions easy and fun.

Also, motion can help us tell that story in less time and with more clarity. The motion also creates a hierarchy and a relationship between objects. The motion also helps to focus on selected objects. Finally, motion helps to make the user interface fun and create a unique brand.

So it all sounds wonderful, but motion, if used incorrectly, can also distract a user and create more confusion. So how do we get the right balance?

Here are some principles when to use motion design:

1. Transitions

Transitions work very well when the user must transfer from one page to another. In this particular case, the motion works almost like a guide and gives hits towards the next step. It works well when you’re leaving, arriving, opening, or closing a section.

2. Feedback

Our eyes are automatically drawn to moving objects. With motion, we can set a hierarchy on the screen and help users to understand the user interface better. Motion can guide users through the onboarding process or complete a shopping cart.

3. Distraction

Sometimes users need to wait while the other page loads. At the same time, they need to stay engaged. Motion can help to keep them engaged as well as show the current progress. A perfect example can be a progress preloader.

Motion in the user interface is very powerful and without a doubt, it will become even more popular over time. The challenge is to use it wisely and to enhance a user experience.

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