mfd | michael forbis design

Brewery Ommegang

Not recent news, but wor­thy of post­ing. Duffy & Part­ners rehabbed the label designs for Brew­ery Ommegang. Inspired by process and ingre­di­ents, the labels con­vey a vibrant, smart prod­uct wor­thy of the pur­chase. The bright col­ors and clean illus­tra­tions will def­i­nitely stand out on the shelves.

Via The Dieline.

Powerful Design for a Powerful…Scalpel?

Myt­ton Williams designed some gor­geously min­i­mal pack­ag­ing and brand­ing for Lotus’ ultra­sonic scalpel. I can’t say that I have seen any pack­ag­ing for any ultra­sonic scalpel, but I can tell you that this has to be fresh­est, smartest take on it to date. Min­i­mal typog­ra­phy is jux­ta­posed with bright, excit­ing col­ored pat­terns that truly works to sell a smart, state-of-the-art product.

My favorite part about this work is that it exists, period. This is the Apple method in use. Make a prod­uct apear to be so sim­ple and intu­itive that it sells itself. The book is judged by the cover and the cover is fu*king awe­some. Never sell your prod­uct short with half-assed pack­ag­ing. On the other hand, make sure your prod­uct is worth it. If not, you will have some pissed off con­sumers who threw away the prod­uct but kept the beau­ti­ful box.

Via Visuelle

New Company Website!

It has been a long time com­ing, but we finally launched a suit­able web­site that ties together the three enti­ties that make up Coolfire. Coolfire Media, Coolfire Solu­tions and Coolfire Orig­i­nals have all been work­ing insanely hard these last few years, and it shows. Just check out all of the work!

The chal­lenge was to com­bine three com­pa­nies’ worth of con­tent into one site while keep­ing usabil­ity intact. The result was a sim­pli­fied, multi-tiered nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem span­ning across a uni­fied design. Well, as sim­ple as that kind of nav­i­ga­tion can be. Color and rich, excit­ing imagery define the sep­a­rate per­son­al­i­ties and dis­ci­plines of Coolfire, ulti­mately trans­lat­ing into a fun, young and cre­atively diverse place to work. We also man­aged to keep this beast respon­sive to browsers on a mul­ti­tude of devices.

Check out what we have been up to at coolfire.com.

Logos for Presidents

I always love when design­ers do great things for fun. There is more of a per­sonal inter­est in it, which leads to bet­ter design and inter­est­ing ideas. Meg Jan­not did just that. Brand­ing the Pres­i­dents of the United States is a tum­blr site show­cas­ing some great typo­graphic explo­ration. It is pretty awesome.

Lymbyc Systym: The Greatest Band Ever.

A good friend of mine passed away only 3 months ago. In an effort to cope with the loss I decided not to ignore it and act like it never hap­pened, but instead to dive right into all of the great things that he showed me and revisit old influ­ences that we shared. If there is one thing that this man knew about and shared his knowl­edge on, it was music. I still remem­ber the day we were shar­ing albums in his office and he insisted that I take home and check out Lym­byc Systym’s Love Your Abuser.

Back then, and this was prob­a­bly in 2007, I wasn’t really dig­ging the instru­men­tal tunes. Maybe my musi­cal palette was not yet refined. There was some­thing there, but I just didn’t know what it was. This band was the first that I dug out of an old hard drive and became instantly immersed.

The loss and grief cer­tainly influ­enced my rein­tro­duc­tion to them, the com­fort it gave me, how­ever after lis­ten­ing to that fresh­man album I real­ized how smart my friend was. Why he chose the music to share became appar­ent. His depth of knowl­edge in music, both lis­ten­ing and per­form­ing, really made him a genius in the sub­ject. Just give it a lis­ten for your­self. Any song, really. Most of them are so com­plex that it is hard to believe that you only lis­tened to 10 or so tracks. For work­ing, exer­cis­ing, dri­ving and breath­ing, Lym­byc Systym is the best.

Figure for iOS by Propellerhead

Pro­peller­head just released a great, addic­tive app for the iPhone called Fig­ure. This app allows you to cre­ate and record a sin­gle loop using sev­eral pre­set instru­ment libraries, but what’s bet­ter is that you can eas­ily tweak and aug­ment the sound, giv­ing you tons of pos­si­bil­i­ties. The design of Fig­ure is spot on. It is min­i­mal (as it should be), sim­ple, intu­itive and pleas­ant to look at. The only down­fall for this $0.99 app is that you have no way of saving/exporting your record­ings. Hope­fully they end up com­ing out with an update to save your clip, but for the price, it is no big deal.

Because I Want My Child to Appreciate the Great Things

With a baby due in Sep­tem­ber, I have been going through every pos­si­ble sce­nario for the devel­op­ment of my child’s per­son­al­ity. One thing is for sure, this kid has to love Zelda. I believe that an appre­ci­a­tion for one of the most clas­sic video games will lead to great things. For the nurs­ery, I found these great posters by Allan Peters. I was going to make my own of some sort, but these are too good. Per­fectly sim­ple, too!

Kick that holiday cheer with the undead.

I love zom­bie movies, or in some cases I take it that true hor­ror buffs wouldn’t con­sider some of them zom­bie films, but more of an epi­demic or ill­ness rather than being (un)dead. Nonethe­less, the films have just the right amount of gore, action and humor to keep me hooked. Even that whiny, mostly bor­ing show on AMC keeps me com­ing back every week. With every new movie comes a new poster. They are usu­ally way over the top and awe­some. Here is a col­lec­tion I put together with the help of Rick Poyner’s arti­cle on Design Observer called “How We Learned to Live with Zom­bies.” Read it here.

Happy 50th, Museum of Modern Art Oxford

In honor of their upcom­ing 50th anniver­sary, the Mod­ern Art Oxford is dis­play­ing 50 exhi­bi­tion posters from their archive to the pub­lic. Stuff like this makes me really appre­ci­ate the sim­plis­tic design sen­si­bil­i­ties of so many design­ers from the UK.

Check out the col­lec­tion here. Idea for this post found here.

International Year of Chemistry Posters by Simon Page

Simon C Page is back with another series of prints ded­i­cated to a field of sci­ence. As usual, they are fan­tas­tic. Great col­ors, great type, great min­i­mal­ism. View them all here.

See his other set of posters devoted to astron­omy, here.