1000 Acres Vodka packaging, posted on lovelypackage.com

Lovely Package® is yet another design loving site to add to your inspiration arsenal. Above is a post from their blog, featuring 1000 Acres Vodka. Wouldn’t you just love to drink this vodka? The packaging suggests to me that it would taste like delicious ice cold spring water and smell like Icelandic alpine tundra. Of course it probably just tastes like vodka and i would still like to mix it with something to mask the taste, but it demonstrates to me the power of good package design.

Design Sponge Online

As a creative I love “Before and Afters.” I love seeing the old logo compared to the new, the old web site compared to the reinvented version, and I especially love seeing environments before and after. I know quite a few people that watch HGTV just to watch the last 5 minutes of each show to see the big reveal – sometimes good and sometimes bad. One site I have become a fan of is Design Sponge. Check out a few of their user submitted Before and Afters.

I’ve always been interested in type design, and the infinite ways that you can display even a single letter. My professor in school used to tell us how, before anyone had computers, type design was a daunting task. He had to draw each character by hand on a piece of paper, trying to achieve the perfect curves and proportions that come together to form a harmonious letter. Afterward, the characters would have to be cast for use in printing processes.

Now, I can create my own fonts through an internet application. Font Shop, an online font licensor, has offered to the public a free flash application called FontStruct, where you can fairly easily create your own fonts using modular shapes on a grid. While font design still requires truly great skill to produce anything of merit, this app certainly opens the doors for experimentation. And it’s pretty amazing what some of the users have come up with, as you can see from the gallery. You can also download user fonts for free for personal use.

My very basic attempt at the letter 'A'.

In this era of waste, “sustainability” is both a strategy and a buzzword.
The idea of packaging water in a plastic container has always seemed kind
of odd to me. Although convenient, the plastic bottles add up pretty quick.
Back in the day, we use to supply bottled water to our studio. It was pretty
easy to see that not only our recycling bin would fill up quickly, but it was a huge waste of effort and money.

www.justdrinkingwater.com

Well, one UK company must be thinking the same way and has decided to jump in on the Go Green bandwagon and package water like a juice box. The packaging is supposedly 70% paper made from sustainable and renewable trees. I wonder if we will see other companies soon following Aquapax lead? I guess their numbers will tell the end of the story.

At Big Wheel, we like to think of ourselves not only as branding and digital media studio, but also as an ideation think tank. Bev-Wrap is one of those ideas that we took beyond idea and turned it into a nice promotional product. It is essentially a beverage cooler, but is different because its flexible design works with virtually any cup size. It also has a large imprint area for branding, themes, or promotions. To learn more, check out bev-wrap.com.

Unfortunately for all of us, people’s visions for the future are often much more exciting and interesting than what actually happens.  During the first half of the twentieth century, people’s opinions of the future were optimistic, to say the least (flying cars, robots that do your housework, rayguns). Now that we’re past the time when these things were supposed to be reality, they’ve become a sort of nostalgic vision of the future. In the 1980’s someone coined the term ‘retro futurism’ to describe this genre.

In the future, you have to lay down to drive your car.

Syd Mead, a conceptual retro-futuristic illustrator who also helped design the sets for the movies Tron, Blade Runner, and Alien, has created some of my favorite visions of the future. His illustrations are sleek, saturated neon landscapes that often feature some sweet rides that sort of reek of the 80’s. See more of his work here on Flickr.

I’m still waiting for my flying car.