Ever since I saw his great 2007 Holiday Card on I’ve been waiting to see more from Gavin Potenza. When I awoke this morning this nice little birthday present waiting for me on FFFOUND. I love the concept and I love the fact that it’s purely a design exercise, which is very fitting considering the name of his site (exploratorydesign.org). As I say in my workshops, that’s when most people will do their best work, when there is no spec, no client, no parameters other than your own. Just you, your imagination, and your tools. As he says on his site, this piece was inspired by Otl Aicher, one can’t really go wrong with that kind of source.
It’s minimalist, reserved design like this that intrigues me more and more these days. To me, modernism is about taking all your ideas about color and type and form and expressing them in the most efficient way possible, which I think is the very core of what we are all trying to do as designers. Also, stamps are awesome, I collected them when I was a kid…along with my obsessive hoarding of any other printed material I could get my hands on. Unfortunately I only had access to boring American stamps so it got boring real quick.
wow this is really beautiful. His website is pretty cool too. Kind of inspires me to redo my own website.
But yeah iv always been a huge advocate of experimentation. Its the best and most rewarding way to learn the software, as well as develop your intuition. Thats my fallback technique if im stuck on a project, ill just say, to hell with it, im just gonna do what i wanna do and well see what happens.
have a good day everyone!
EJ
Nice looking stuff.
Also, its the first time that I’ve seen FFFound. At first glance, it looks like a kind of delicious (social bookmarking) for images? Seems that there would be issues with copyright and/or attribution?
btw, Happy birthday!
Gareth-
thanks…. and yeah, FFFFOUND is basically a small, closed group of users who can post random images. I don’t think there are really many legal issues, I post stuff from random sources here all the time, I think the internet is sort of fair game. But keep an eye on FFFFOUND, a lot of amazing stuff goes through there. only problem is that there are soooo many posts it’s hard to keep up, you miss some things.
Eric-
for sure, his site is great, love the layout and nav.
HB!
Yeah, this is my favorite type of graphic design as well. Down with maximalism!
You always seem to find the really cool album designs, and advertising… not to mention music! I really enjoyed all the photos from Prague (thanks for getting those up)
So Scott, when actually are you going to come to Florida? I’ll have a feeling I have to travel to LA or Austin to see those visuals one day.
those are so cool. you should make some for the USPS! ha, that would be cool.
great find
How could I have missed this post?! I can’t believe that these stamps are “just” exercises. Incredible!
Very nice . Thanks for sharing with us!!