Ian Moss asked me a question I just had to answer: what's your favourite kind of design?

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I was asked by Ian Moss

Quite a long time ago now

Sorry Ian

What my favourite piece of design is

And what areas, such as communication, graphic design, architecture

This is new for this format of AADA

Because I’ve never answered somebody’s question before

But Ian is a good friend, and it’s a good question

So I’m going to do my best to answer it

Let’s give it a try.

This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess

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There’s two things I remember distinctly when I first started realising I was into design

One of them I only realised retrospectively

And the second one was my first love of graphic design

The retrospective one is something I’ve spoken about way back in episode 81, the design disease

I mentioned the WWF logo, the World Wrestling Federation

At the time in my teens, I was mega into wrestling

And I used to love reproducing their logo with a marker pen over and over

It was the only logo I could draw, so I went nuts with it

I got pretty good at drawing it too actually

Looking back at this now, I wonder if the WWF—now WWE made their logo like that on purpose

The two things I’ve long since had in my head about logo design

Is it should be simple enough so anybody can draw it

And it should be able to fit on a postage stamp

The WWF logo did both of those things

And it was accessible

It wasn’t a great logo from any technical standpoint

But it fit the bill, it fit the kind of audience they wanted to attract

And it meant young teenagers like me could draw it easily and spread their message

Logos have long since been a favourite part of design for me

They are the perfect distilled version of graphic design

It takes so much skill to create something that looks so simple

And it’s why I’m constantly fascinated with logos

It’s my favourite part of design to produce, and admire

And as for my favourite logos

I’m probably a bit predictable here

I love Coca Cola’s logo, not just because it looks nice, but because they’ve had the balls to stick with it

And whilst I’m not a big fan of Apple as a business or company anymore, their logo through the ages and today is just perfect

I also have a soft spot for the new Juventus FC logo, but that’s probably because I’m not a football fan and I like that it looks different to every other football logo

The second thing I adored then I first started in design

Was everything that The Designers Republic did

As a kid, I got the original Playstation with Wipeout for christmas

And back then I used to love looking through the manuals after I got the game

Some game companies put effort into these manuals

And this was a game that put a lot of effort into the manual

Not only that, the case was so nice

All the graphics and artwork was—to my young eyes—just so cool

Even looking back at it now

Some 22 years later

It still looks so cool

In their hey day, that’s what The Designers Republic were really good at

Making things just look so damn cool

Designers are usually pretty good at making stuff look cool

But The Designers Republic went a step further than that

Everything they touched, from video games to coke bottles to record sleeves

All just looked so cool

It’s a style these days that has been emulated endlessly

But some of the originals who worked there

Like Michael C Place

Still create really cool looking stuff to this day

I’m nearly out of time for this episode

And I have to put a time limit on this because I could gush for days about my favourite design

But I just quickly wanted to mention one final thing I love

Wit

Wit in any form of design, and here I mean clever design

I just love in any medium

Maybe I’ll expand on this on a future episode

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