A contributor to the excellent blog FormFiftyFive, Glasgow based designer Ed Watt has compiled an excellent portfolio filled with quality stuff.
I personally love the flyer pictured above made for the Maryhill Youth Theatre to promote one of their productions. Gorgeous. I also love Ed’s griddy site design.
What’s gorgeous about it?
I like it. It demonstrates the power of simplicity. Grid+Helveitca+B&W.
This is the kind of design that people look at, and think, ‘that’s so simple; I could do that.’ Well, try.
Although I understand how he’s tried to tie it in with the production I don’t think it’s a particularly effective piece of graphic communication, which in my opinion is far more important than another exercise in Grid+Helveitca+B&W.
Without reading the side description on his site – only the flyer – it struck me as bland and rather like the many minimal Helvetica pieces I’ve seen before. Only once I’d read the description did I understand the point in the B/W simplicity, will people only realise after going to the production? The message isn’t being put across well and this is why I’m not all that impressed.
http://www.ollymoss.com/ produces what I would call gorgeous, simple communication. But I don’t expect everyone to be that good, imo Ed has some much better work than the one chosen above 🙂
It’s all subjective really. Personally I think the Olly Moss work is nice but I prefer this design by Ed. It’s type of aesthetics that I connect with. To me it’s very affective. Always subjective of course. But, I think we can all agree that Ed Watt is a talented designer, which is the point of this post.
For me it’s about charm. I find this particular piece completely charmless. Like OneOneOne says it doesn’t communicate much and what it does communicate is done in a cold/minimalist approach which only suits other designers.
No offense…
Oh and the website link doesn’t seem to work?