Wk52 2024
Design
Signage Design by Domus Vim
Sydney is a city thriving with hospitality venues, from the fancier end of town with CBD venues where you can host your business meetings, to the grungier, looser spots in the Inner West region of the city.
In the latter region there has been a common thread of highly designed environments, with considered interior design and branding. With that higher-quality visual identity comes the need for considered signage. A well-designed storefront sign can be an attractive factor in pulling in customers.
And for the most recent venue openings one name has been dominating that market, Domus Vim.
Domus Vim, led by Ian Tran, designs are of a superior quality, having a very refined look and feel to them that elevates any venues it adorns. The other attractive quality to Tran’s work is the lack of predictability or standardisation, meaning that you never know what the next project will look like yet you can tell who designed it by the level of craftsmanship.
How to Improve Your Thinking Skills
Starting a Creative Business
(Fashion Brand)
Ken Sakata might have popped up on your Instagram or TikTok feed with his in-depth studies on different fashion trends throughout history as well as fashion history, like the uniforms of samurais.
His deep knowledge has naturally led him to recently start his own fashion brand, Front Office, which now has a physical retail location in Melbourne, Australia.
One other great source of Ken’s content is his YouTube channel where he recently posted a video going through his experience of starting a fashion brand.
It’s a great watch that covers some of the main basic anxieties people often have before, and that prevent them from, starting a fashion brand.
Even if you are like myself and not interested in starting a fashion brand, I think the principles covered are still useful knowledge to carry in whatever pursuits we might want to embark on later in life, especially if they are creative entrepreneurial endeavours of any sort. Enjoy.
The Pursuit of Professionalism and Its Hindrances
In an essay titled ‘A Brand Only Exists if It’s on a Tote’, Elizabeth Goodspeed analyses the fascination of designers with mokcups.
For those who might be unfamiliar with the term, mockups are base files that are purchased by designers around the world to place their designs into and make them look as if they had been professionally photographed, or in the instance of print media, actually printed in a newspaper or a billboard on the street.
Mockups are an incredibly useful tool that is widely adopted especially by younger designers who do not have the resources to execute photo shoots or print live size versions of their work. I personally have been using these mockup files for years.
Entire businesses have been formed around creating and selling these essential assets, distinguishing themselves through unique and cheeky creative direction, such as Bendito Mockup.
However, with the wider implementation of these assets there has been some unintended consequences as Goodspeed points out in her essay. The pressure to have professionally-presented work in order to stand out can detract focus from the work itself. I have been guilty in the past myself of trying to use professional grade mockups to elevate mediocre work, which should never be the approach taken. The mockups can also present a framework within which we feel forced to make our work fit into, reducing the chances that unique work in different dimensions will be made since it won’t neatly fit into the mockups we use.
There has recently been a swing in the opposite direction with designers showcasing their work in simple and minimalist forms such as scanning their print work and uploading that straight into their website. This has in turn become its own aesthetic.
