Creative round-up September 2024
September has been an interesting month for design and branding news. Here’s our latest creative round-up with Ingenious Design’s pick of arty happenings that have caught the eyes of the design team over the last few weeks…
PayPal rebrand
Financial tech company PayPal is 25 years old and has just had a brand refresh led by Pentagram partner, Andrea Trabucco-Campos. The logo has been redrawn with a sharper, more contemporary cut and a new wordmark set in the brand’s custom typeface, PayPal Pro. The colour palette has been edited, losing excess colours for a focus on its traditional blues with neutral black and white backgrounds.
In contrast to the pared down palette, a colour-saturated photo series featuring people in ‘moments that felt real, spontaneous and authentic’ gives the brand a more personal look and feel and clever motion graphics mimic payment gestures such as tapping, flipping and swiping.
Look out for the refresh which also marks the launch of a new PayPal debit card together with other new expressions and applications.
Nike: Form Follows Motion exhibition
Nike’s debut exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum follows 50 years of the sportswear brand from its grassroots start-up to the global giant it is today. Featuring stories from the earliest days making the first waffle sole and the origins of its famous swoosh logo, to development of iconic products such as Air Max and Fly Knit. The exhibition examines ‘Nike’s involvement with technological innovation and social change’ with a focus on its design history and concept of ‘whole design culture’.
Showcasing items taken from the company’s extensive archives including prototypes, experiments, sketches and material samples, Mateo Kries, Vitra Design Museum director says the show hopes to ‘emphasise the importance of sports for design innovation and social change, while also shedding a light on the almost mythical devotion to sneakers and sportswear in popular culture’.
Running from 21 Sept 2024 – 4 May 2025 at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, the show will then travel to other international museum venues.
London Design Festival
The 22nd edition of the London Design Festival ran from 14 – 22 September, promoting London as the design capital of the world. Visitors were treated to everything from an installation inspired by Barbie’s Dreamhouse to an exhibition devoted to the late furniture designer, Robin Day.
Other highlights included Liquid Light, an installation at The Old Selfridges Hotel featuring delicate glass forms suspended in mid-air, providing a stunning sensory experience of glass, light and sound. Celebrating the craftsmanship of glassblowing, the suspended glass forms simultaneously embodied strength and fragility as well as design innovation.
Vert, a vertical greening system was installed in the Parade Ground at Chelsea College of Arts. Introducing vegetation into the urban environment is a common strategy to mitigate the effects of pollution and climate change and the thoughtful design of Vert’s structure was estimated to cool its surrounding air by as much as 8ºC, and cast four times more shade than a 20-year-old tree.
Well Made: What it Means Today, an exhibition at Yorkton Workshops, Hackney aimed to redefine what ‘good design’ means in a time of climate crisis, industrialisation and globalisation. Curators Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd, founders of Pearson Lloyd Design Studio, asked a diverse group including other designers to pick their hero products which included everything from a straw hat, glass milk bottle and hot water bottle to cutting edge products such as a solar powered heating mat for refugees, 3D-printed wool and soluble circuit boards. As well as celebrating the magic of everyday objects which are pleasing to look at, improve everyday life and demonstrate ingenious human ideas, the exhibition was an important one for the design industry, opening a ‘conversation about how we have defined well made in the past and how we need to redefine well made in the future – so that we have a future to look forward to’.
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers
Just opened at the National Gallery in London and running until 19 January 2025, this new blockbuster exhibition focuses on Van Gogh’s creative output between 1888 and 1890, one of the most prolific periods of his career. Based in the south of France, the artist produced hundreds of breathtaking paintings using bold colours and new techniques. Although suffering emotional turmoil and mental breakdowns, Van Gogh created some of his most celebrated works during this period, some of which have been brought together for the first time.
The exhibition aims to ‘show the artist rather than the tortured soul’ and cleverly recreates displays of Van Gogh’s work which he meticulously curated in his rented rooms in Arles over 100 years ago.