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15th March 2023 In Art, Colours, Film camera, Paper

Vintage film cameras meticulously built from coloured paper

Vintage film cameras meticulously built from coloured paper by Lee Ji-Hee

Korean artist Lee Ji-Hee builds paper models of old film cameras, recreating the details of their every mechanism through expertly folded paper.

Although his paper cameras match the original in every aspect of their form, the colours he selects for his designs are much different. Instead of matching the black, brown, and grey colour schemes consistent with the 1952 Leica IIIf Red Dial or 1938 Super Kodak Six-20, Lee chooses flashy colours and patterns that give each device an updated aesthetic.

Kate Sierzputowski for ThisisColossal. July 2017

8th March 2023 In Art, Colours, Cosiness, Creations, Design, Pavers, Pop-culture

Javier de Riba’s patterned floors establish vibrant gathering spaces.

Javier de Riba’s patterned floors establish vibrant gathering spaces for public use.

Catalan artist Javier de Riba brings the cosiness of home outdoors with his ongoing Floors Project. Made possible with the help of the local community, the collaborative endeavour involves painting a specially designed motif onto the concrete or pavers that line walkways and city squares.

Each intervention serves several purposes, including adding colour to an otherwise grey setting, connecting locals to the artist and each other through art making, and establishing a welcoming gathering space during an urban environment.

De Riba has completed five of the carpets so far, four in Spain and one in Shenzen, China. He’s traveling to Breda, The Netherlands, this June to collaborate with Blind Walls Gallery on the largest work yet, which will span approximately 400 square feet.

Grace Ebert for ThisisColossal.com. February 2023.

20th January 2023 In Art, Collage, Colours, Creations, Fibres, Portrait, Textures

Metaphorical portraits deconstruct art history as collaged specimens

Metaphorical portraits by Michael Mapes deconstruct art history as collaged specimens

Photographs, scraps of fabric, human hair, dried flowers, and gelatine capsules are a few of the materials that artist Michael Mapes arranges into fragmented portraits and still life’s.

Referencing traditions and prominent works in art history, Mapes interprets figures and fruits through deconstructed compositions. Set in specimen boxes evocative of those used in entomological studies, the collagesutilize the metaphor of scientific study to dismantle and reconstruct the contexts and meanings of the original works.

Mapes begins each piece with research around the subject matter and materials, and many of the artist’s most recent works centre on muses, like fashion designer Emile Louise Flöge who was the lifelong companion of Gustav Klimt. “I’ve been making studies, smaller scale works that allow me to consider compositional approaches for larger pieces,” he says about the series. “It connects the past to the present in a very personal way.

A muse vibe is inspired by mining art history to find subjects that resonate with me and my work process.”

Grace Ebert for ThisisColossal.com. August 2022

17th January 2023 In Artwork, Colours, Creations, Fibres, Textures

Crocheted toasts and turkey dinners prepared with fibres

Crocheted toasts, ramen, and turkey dinners are prepared with fibres by Maria Skog

Maria Skog guarantees her orange slices, turkey, and eggs won’t spoil. She crochets fibre-based creations with preservation in mind, ensuring that every berry and bagel stays as fresh as the day they were made.

Based in Närpes, Finland, Skog began crafting the fare for her two daughters about 12 years ago when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The practice was meditative and calming. “If I wouldn’t survive, I wanted the girls to have living memories of me, and I thought that they would remember us playing together with the food I crocheted myself,” she says.

Grace Ebert for ThisisColossal.com. January 2023. All images © Maria Skog.

4th January 2023 In Branding, Car, Colours, Design, Digital, Logo, Marketing

Best car rebrand

The best car rebrands we’ve seen yet

These new car logos were in the right gear.

Car rebranding seem to come at a rate of almost one a month these days. Over the past year, we’ve seen new car logos from Aston Martin, Citroen Dacia, Skoda – and of course Kia. The last of those is an example for another roundup since it doesn’t seem to be working very well. In this piece, we’re recapping the car logo redesigns that got it right.

In most cases car rebranding these days means simplifying and flattening the existing logo to make it look more modern and make it more practical to use in small placements like app icons and favicons. Sometimes that can make for a boring rebrand, but we’ve seen examples of car brands that handled it well, creating sleek new looks that respect their legacies. Here’s our pick of the best recent examples.

Aston Martin

The new Kia logo shows just what can go wrong when car logos are redesigned to make them more modern. The Aston Martin logo redesign is a different story. Designed by Peter Saville, the new Aston Martin logo revealed in July shows how sometimes a subtle change is what’s needed.

Saville followed a trend we’ve seen in other car brands, simplifying the winged Aston Martin badge. He replaced the gradient background with a solid racing green and ditched the fussy semi-circular line on the wings. While it might seem like a simple transformation, it gets things just right, respecting the brand’s heritage while also looking totally contemporary.

Citroen

The new Citroen logo achieved something that might seem an impossible contradiction. It looks simultaneously more modern and more traditional than the previous design. To do that, the company when full circle, or rather full oval, travelling back a century to revisit its original oval-shaped logo from 1919.

With a few tweaks and a more modern colour palette, the result is a logo that’s both leaner and more in keeping with the brand’s heritage. They do say that you must go backwards to go forwards, although don’t try that behind the wheel.

Skoda

The new Skoda logo was a bit more divisive, but it was generally seen as a winner. it flattened its winged arrow symbol, developed a new wordmark, and updated Škoda’s traditional green with two new shades: emerald and electric.

The type of logo also aims to resolve the issue of the inverted circumflex accent, or caron, over the S in the brand’s name. Now we didn’t really see this an issue at all, but the company thinks it was confusing for a global audience. Its solution was a little strange, trying to sit on the fence by keeping the accent there but hiding it inside the S, so you can decide if you want to see it or not. Strange, the design does look sleeker, if a little Tesla-like.

Dacia

Now Dacia’s a car brand that can take more liberties in overhauling its image since it doesn’t have such a long legacy in many countries. That meant it could take a radical departure for a more modern, geometric look that could almost convince us that it’s a higher-end brand. It’s a refreshing transformation for a value-focused carmaker that Renault bought from the Romanian government just over 20 years ago.

Renault describes the design as communicating “pared-back and cunning character.” I’m not sure cunning is what we want from a car, but sure, OK. It scrapped the closing strokes on the ‘D’ and ‘A’, leaving minimal mirror-image forms for a simple, geometrical look with a mechanical feel. The accompanying emblem is derived from the logotype, bringing together the ‘D’ and ‘C’, to form a symmetrical link.

There’s a new earthy colour palette too, evoking “the brand’s closeness to nature”, although that’s an association that can be controversial for car brands as Mercedes found out last year.

BMW

This one’s going further back, but it’s worth remembering as a masterclass in logo updates. Unveiled in March 2020, the new BMW logo is a transparent, flat reimagining of the previously metallic emblem. The classic black outer ring was made completely transparent, and the 3D and lighting effects have been removed to create a minimal new look that retains the white and blue colours of the company’s home state of Bavaria.

We remain big fans of the clean design, which feels model and adapts to new technology but acknowledges the brand’s century-old heritage. There was initially some scepticism online, but the design’s now been proven to work well in both physical applications as well as digital.

Rolls Royce

Rolls Royce also got its car rebranding right with the redesign of its iconic emblem back in 2020. The company promoted its Spirit of Ecstasy figurine to a more prominent position in its branding after flipping it to face the right and paring back the details to make it work in digital uses. The car brand also changed the font of its type logo to make it more in keeping with a contemporary luxury brand, with a slim, sophisticated all-caps logotype.

Joseph Foley for Creative Bloq. January 2023.

23rd October 2022 In Architecture, Colours, Photography, Portrait

Exquisite architectural photos glimpse life in late ‘90s Cuba

Exquisite architectural photos by Andrew Moore glimpse life in late ‘90s Cuba

Between September 1998 and January 2001, Andrew Moore travelled around Cuba meeting residents and photographing them among their built environments. He snapped more than 700 8 x 10 colour negatives during that period, producing a staggering visual record of a particular moment in the country’s history primarily shown through its architecture.

Through Moore’s lens, Cuba’s palatial residences and generally lavish interiors with marble and gilded detailsare shown tinged with decay: Paint peels from a ceiling to reveal structural wooden slats, broken windows are left in disrepair, and mismatched outdoor seating and modern appliances become out-of-place furnishings in once opulent rooms.

Shot mostly in urban metropolises, the alluring images are evidence of architecture’s power to both respond to and produce a community’s way of life. Havana, Moore shares with Colossal, is built vertically, with tile roofs, high ceilings, and tall windows that encircle central courtyards and offer relief from the fierce heat and sun. “The daylight is generally hard and creates deep shadows, while by night, which falls quickly, the city is quite dark with little by way of street lighting,” he says. Outdoor walls bleach over time from the sun, and verdant foliage and plant life grow in lush tufts from window boxes and landscaped villas.

Many of the buildings Moore photographed were constructed before air-conditioning was ubiquitous and at the time, hadn’t undergone significant updates. During his visit—Cuba and its residents were notably experiencing the effects of U.S. embargos between 1998 and 2001—this resulted in dozens of residents living together in a structure designed for single families. He explains:

These domestic clusters are known as solars. Given these crowded living conditions, and the tropical climate, Havana can seem like a city inside out: in their extraordinary activity, the overflowing streets remind one of a vast living room. Thus, it became of particular importance to me to depict the architectural fabric of this unique city and country within the context of its people.

Residents, while often seen in the distance of the frame, add intimacy and humanity to the series. Along with assistants Ondrej Kubicek, Laurence Dutton, Kevin Fletcher, and Bart Michels, Moore interacted with locals and heard stories about their lives, which were translated by his friend Paquito Vives, while producing the collection. “All of us learned about the city by walking its streets, by knocking on doors, and through talking with the residents about the history of their city,” he shares. “People would frequently complain about the condition of their houses, but they were always friendly and most freely invited us into their homes for a small coffee and long conversations.”

Professionally for Moore, this staggering body of work was his first chance to gather “colour harmony, natural light, deep and shallow space, narrative detail, cultural history, and the human figure” within a single image. It was inspired by Julius Schulman’s photos of Mid-Century Modern architecture and the way people configure within a space, a concern that’s visible throughout his extensive archive of locales in Russia and Ukraine, New York, and Detroit.

ThisisColossal, Grace Ebert. January 2022.

6th October 2022 In Branding, Colours, Design, Games, Graphic Design, Identity, Illustration, Olympics, Typographic

Finally, the Olympics has branding

Finally, the Olympics has branding as epic as the games themselves

The games’ first full style guide is longer than the Olympic Charter.

The Olympic Games symbol is one of the most recognised icons in the world. But perhaps strangely, despite logos and poster designs for each individual Olympics, and despite the measures it takes to protect its trademarks, the International Olympics Committee has never had a full brand identity.

Until now, that is. Some 125 years after the first modern Olympic Games, the IOC has developed a full package of brand assets, with colours, graphics, illustrations and three exclusive typefaces. As we’ll see below, there are more colours than you might think. But the branding is very much like the Olympics itself, vibrant, colourful, exciting and with lots of rules. In fact, the style guide – or guides – are among the longest we’ve ever seen.

The International Olympic Committee has presented an epic new brand identity for the Olympic Games ahead of Paris 2024. Of course, the Olympic rings themselves remain as they are, but there’s now a wide-ranging set of graphics, type, illustrations, and colours with rules on possible combinations, all designed to strike a balance between “tradition and modernity” for a visual identity that can exist both online and in physical pieces.

The IOC says it’s the first time it’s created a full set of graphics and typefaces to represent the games across all channels. To do so it worked with the creative agency Hulse & Durrell, on a project that started way back in 2018. It’s already begun using some of the new assets, but it’s now published its full brand guidelines, full-style guides. At 129 pages, the full document is longer than the Olympic Charter, but here’s a look at some of the highlights.

The new Olympic colours

One big change is that the Olympic colour palette has been expanded to include additional darker and lighter shades of the five colours of the Olympics rings. The colours of the gold, silver, and bronze medals have also been incorporated into the palette, along with rules about how they can be combined.

Olympics branding graphics and illustrations

The Olympic brand guidelines include detailed guidance for everything from illustration styles to photographyand infographics. There are 17 official hand-drawn illustrations. Created by artists Francesco Ciccolella, Abbey Lossing, and Karan Singh. the vibrant designs are intended to capture the spirit of the games and were conceived to allow a range of options for cropping to different applications.

There’s also a set of graphics inspired by the geometry of the field of play in various Olympics sports and pictograms depicting all the Olympics events. And there are plenty of rules and recommendations about each should be applied – a dream for anyone who loves directing brand guidelines.

The new Olympic typography

There’s a full set of brand type too. Fabian Harb and Seb McClauchlan from the type studio Dinamo and Julien Hérbert from Canadian design agency Principal were drafted in to develop three exclusive typefaces for the Olympics: Olympic Headline, Olympic Sans and Olympic Serif. The first, with caps only, is described as “bold, athletic and proud” and was inspired by typography used in the Tokyo 1964 and Seoul 1988 emblems.

The new Olympics branding is bright and vibrant and seems to gel well with the spirit of the games. It feels fresh and modern – but at the same time more in line with the Olympic tradition and legacy than the much-mocked Paris 2024 logo.

CreativeBloq, Joseph Foley. September 2022