The One-Inch Grid

I’m a terrible present wrapper. My cuts are always off line and i always have way too much paper on the ends of my package and not enough in the middle where i need the paper to meet. I’ve watched a long string of very good present wrappers ply their trade with no noticeable improvement in my own ability. Innovations in wrapping paper design that make it easier for me to cut the shape I want to cut are a christmas wrapping god-send for someone like me.

How do you improve on wrapping paper? It’s cheap, it’s easy to cut and fold, it’s easy to rip into and it’s easy to dispose of. Pretty perfect, all things considered.

Here’s how you improve wrapping paper: grid out the back side in one-inch squares for easier cutting.

Incremental improvement is the way to add value to a product that has already been universally accepted. You’d probably have a hard time getting people to try a product like “spray on wrapping paper,” for example. It’s too extreme. No one would use it, and the product would fail. That doesn’t mean that wrapping paper is perfectly designed and can not be improved. What it does mean is that improvement needs to be applied in a way that clearly adds value to the product without scaring away people like my mother who have been using said product for decades.

Merry Christmas.

Without looking at the picture below: What color is the Discover Card brand?

Do you know how hard it is to take a picture of a credit card edge without getting any numbers in the frame?

Orange. Right.

I wouldn’t say they own the color, necessarily, but Discover Card (the brand) is orange, just like American Express is green, MasterCard is red and yellow and Visa is yellow-orange and blue. Clearly, a Discover Card doesn’t have to be orange to be recognizable because the logo takes care of that, but references to orange help to strengthen the brand.

Plastic Makes Perfect

It should come as no surprise perhaps, that this Discover Card has a bright orange edge. I’m pretty sure the substrate on which the design has been screen printed is actually orange, (although I’m really not interested in cutting it in half to check).

What I mean by that is that, much like a piece of black matte board which is black all the way through, and not just two pieces of black surface stuck to an inner layer of a different color, I’m pretty sure this whole card is printed on solid orange plastic.

Yeah? So?

Clearly, the use of orange reinforces the brand but the orange edge on this card serves another, subtler yet extremely valuable purpose. I find this amazing because it’s one of those design solutions that are so basic and so simple that they are incredibly hard to imagine. I mean…who would ever think the edge of a credit card could be useful for anything except scraping the ice off your windshield, picking your teeth or jimmying open stubbornly locked doors?

To appreciate the brilliance of the orange edge, let’s take a look at the Discover card in it’s natural habitat, nestled snugly between my library card and driver’s license in my beat-up, yet trusty wallet:

The Discover Card in its natural habitat

Pretty easy to find the Discover Card, isn’t it? I wonder how many extra transactions Discover lands each year simply because credit cards look exactly the same when you’re trying to distinguish them using only the edge.

Very cool design work, Discover Card. Two thumbs up.

 

My life was dark and cloudy in those awful days before Google Reader started delivering a steady stream of daily design inspiration. Back in the day, we used to get our content from sites like nytimes.com and we used to have to walk up hill to get it…both ways…in the snow…

Now I’ve got it pretty sweet. Every time I open google reader I find myself overwhelmed by an ocean of incredible content to wade through. It doesn’t take very long to jar loose some new ideas when you’re flipping through the posts at such incredible gallery sites as Webcreme, Design You Trust, OMG Posters!, and Deviant Art.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

The downside of all this content is that every time I manage to execute a really cool design that I’m pretty proud of, there’s always this quiet nagging doubt in the back of my head: “Is this really mine? Am I good enough to have done this all by myself? Have I seen this before, and my subconscious is having more luck remembering where I saw it then the rest of my brain is?”

Be inspired without leeching

I suffer from the Blank Sheet of Paper Syndrome. My nascent career has been one giant tug-of-war between Fearing Failure on the one extreme, and Riding the Narrabeen of Creative Triumph on the other. The later is what sees me through the former (and the band plays on…)

At the start of the really big projects, there’s always that sheer moment of plain-white-sheet terror when everything on the desk (both physical and virtual) that can be tidied has been, every email is answered, the iTunes play list is set to run and the realization comes crashing in that it’s time to get down to business. When the cold reality of the design process stares you in the face, it’s only natural to hit the interwebs in search of inspiration to aid your design’s conception.

Step 1 (and Only)

By all means, soak up as much as you can. Inspiration can come from anywhere. Eventually (and it probably won’t be very long) the ideas will start to flow. The single best thing you can do is spend some good quality time with the images, or websites, or logos or whatever…take a metaphorical deep mental breath of the whole lot of it and the put it away for an hour while you get to work, concentrating only on your design.

It’s okay to go back and look. By all means be inspired, but if you’re anything like me, the more you have right there in front of you to use as a visual reference, the less likely you are to make your design your own.

Step 1 on the road to a unique design that’s inspired by the work of others but wholly your own: When it’s time to start working, first stop looking at your inspiration.