Today we want to talk about a commission which will never win a LAUS or Art Directors Club award. We do like the award winning kind of projects, but many times they seem to be made mostly to appeal to other designers, and sometimes even can make graphic design look like a frivolous profession.

Some time ago we designed a book named “Viu l’envelliment actiu”, “Live ageing actively”, for Obra Social “la Caixa”. As the title says, it’s a book about the ageing process and its possible, or probable, effects on our physical and mental abilities.

I remember when Lourdes from Obra Social “la Caixa” first explained the project, and gave some specific requirements: big font size, good chromatic contrast, weight, size, and so on, all about good readability for seniors.

It was a complicated job which lasted over almost a year. Each and every graphic decision was made taking in account optimum readability. At some point it resembled more an investigation than a job, and stretched the budget to breaking point. But looking back we feel a special satisfaction: graphic design at its best, fulfilling a social function.

Famous publicist Luis Bassat from Bassat Ogilvy & Mather, in 1994 estimated that the number of visual stimuli a person is exposed to amounts to 2.000—daily. And that was 17 years ago.

Studio Smack of Breda (Holland) has taken a taken a walk through a city and has then isolated the graphic design elements found on the way. The film’s name “Kapitaal” invites a critical refecletion on the plague of visual stimuli in our time.

As graphic designers we have the responsability to avoid unnecessary graphic noise and streamline visual communication to make it more effective, for the best of our clients and innocent passer-bys.

What do you think? Which one of these two logos has a better graphic design? Ryanair’s, a logo with a “cheap” look, lively colours and imperfect kerning? Or Lufthansa’s, designed with Helvetica —a typography revered by graphic designers— with perfect spacing?

From a traditional Graphic Designer’s point of view, the better design clearly is Lufthansa’s. But… which logo stands for the company which has changed the rules of the flying business? Ryanair’s.

We dont want to discuss which design is more beautiful, or better resolved. We just wanted to visualize the power of Graphic Design to represent a company’s values with Corporate Identity’s minimal expresion: a logo.

So we played around a bit and changed the code.
Here’s to the power of Graphic Design!

Inspired by “Blinds in the supermarket” by Julia Font.

Some time ago, thanks to a visit from Eulalia Paris from the Art Directors Club of Barcelona (ADG-FAD) to our hometown, we had the idea to organise the Chill Laus Sabadell.

The Chill Laus are design meetings regularly held at Barcelona, Madrid, Murcia, and from February 2011 on, also at Sabadell.

We’ve been able to organise the first conference at February 8, in the Vapor Badia Library, thanks to Judith Corominas of the design school Illa, with help from ESDI (design school of the University Ramon Llull), Xarxa Onion (a business network from Sabadell), the Chamber of Commerce of Sabadell and the Town Council of Sabadell. Our invited guest will be Lluís Morillas.

We hope to put together 2 o 3 Chill Laus Sabadell each year, to further discussion between professionals, students, institutions and business partners who believe that good design is an indispensable value in our society.

These days we received the news that the project “Chimneys of Sabadell. A look at the history” of the Museums of Sabadell has received a special mention in the Special Heritage Award of Bonaplata Awards 2010.

The Bonaplata Awards, organized by the Association of the Science and Technology and Industrial Archaeology Museum of Catalonia, awards, year after year, people or institutions that have contributed to promote our industrial heritage.

In 2007, Cèl·lula was responsible for the industrial design, graphic design and the production of the signage system of Sabadell’s chimneys, making a typographic tribute to Sabadell’s artist Antoni Vila Arrufat and the industrial revolution. PDF

We congratulate those responsible for the project and we thank the Museum of Sabadell for trusting with this project we enjoyed very much.

We admit we haven’t been to the Mariscal graphic design expo at La Pedrera in Barcelona yet (there’s still time until January 30).

But we take our hat off to him, a provocative, brilliant and imaginative figure descended from another galaxy who’s come to teach us that dyslexia can be an advantage, and that the credit of his famous Cobi [the ’92 Olympics mascot] really goes to the client: “It was Pasqual Maragall [then major of Barcelona] who convinced those who had to vote that this strange creature was right,” he says, “the credit always goes to the client who commissioned the work”. Amen to that!

Source: El País

Yesterday we received the book “Typo Shirt one” with a selection of graphic design, exclusively typographic, for T-shirts.

We enjoyed seeing our design, a T-shirt for Barcelona’s fotographic Studio “Starp Estudi“, in between graphic design proposals from around the world.

“Type One Shirt” is a book written by the design studio Magma Brand Design from Germany and published by IndexBook.