Designers Toolbox

There are universal icons and cues that have been implemented into cultures that carry undeniable responses. Such connotations with these indicators can create very easy solutions to design problems, yet, if it is not the most appropriate route it can push designers into back into a wall and no matter how much and how hard they try to supply the idea with more noise to make it credible, you will never succeed to convince an audience, only obscure. These ‘pre-packaged’ responses within our culture, such as; color, form, natural objects, fabricated objects, brands, spaces, and the list goes on, are the graphic tools in which the designer keeps handy in his box of strategy.

One of my compeers in class created a brand using the colors red and green , colors most associated with stop and go, or Christmas, to signify a food brand that alerted the user with a red or green light to denote if your leftover fridge food has gone sour. She then pushed this color connection to the next level of its cultural interpretation by placing it in the recognized form of a stoplight. You would have a easier time selling me motor oil for milk. But by adding that one graphic around two circles of color it instantly boxed in how the audience reacts to the product. Now the brand became a street or a traffic identity rather than its initial search to be a food brand.

Graphic design is a Frankenstein-like vernacular made up of all previous languages and intellect, it creates a visual dialogue that allows a person to interact and understand something that doesn’t have room for misinterpretation. It that has the ability to shape the significance of ideas and other cultural matter but it also one of the most limiting disciplines because of these deterrents. Graphic designers have to be terse and expectably omniscient in order to make sense of the world.