Whether promoting environmental safety, an exhibition, or a college class, these designers catch our attention not only with original and clever designs, but also with their eye-catching use of color.
“It Is Not a Game” (above, left) is an environmental poster entry by Goyen Chen, a designer at the Taiwan based design firm NFliGht. Reminiscent of graphic design brutalistism, a style that intentionally attempts to look raw, haphazard, or unadorned, the poster utilizes a nontraditional layout, loud neon colors, and large sans serif fonts to call attention to people’s habits in relation to the environment. At the center of the poster, the image of the earth imitates the Pop-up Pirate game (a children’s game of luck where you stick plastic swords in a spring loaded barrel, trying not to trigger a pirate figurine), with sharp swords repeatedly driving into the earth’s “slots” to represent the greenhouse gases that continue to destroy the ozone layer. The titular phrase, “It is not a game”, is printed repeatedly along the margins of the poster, warning that if we continue to gamble with earth’s health, we could lose everything.
Graphis Master Hoon-Dong Chung is a designer and professor at Dankook Univerity whose experiments in typography and 3D font projects are forward-thinking and awe-inspiring. His latest entry, “D-Revolution” (above, right), was created for the Gwangju Design Biennale, a design competition hosted in Gwangju City, South Korea that’s organized by the Gwangju Institute of Design Promotion (GIDP) Foundation. The Gwangju Design Biennale focuses on presenting the future of design and expanding the aesthetical, practical and economic values of design attributes, which resulted in the theme for their 2021 competition, “d-Revolution.” This theme is a compound composed of the letter D for design and the word revolution, which refers to the “paradigm of a new era driven by design, not a revolution propelled by industrial inventions as in the past.” Chung conveys this in his poster design, using 3D cubes to form the letter D with “revolution” at its center. Between the shapes and the text, Chung displays mastery over dimensional graphics and modeling.
