Tag Archives: CMF

The 2000’s is the decade that designers, in all industries and categories, rediscovered texture. As Minimalism moved through the aesthetic landscape, highly simplified, clean, understated forms became predominant. However, to offset the potential visual boredom these simple shapes can suffer from, designers sought to break them up with the juxtaposition...

There are only so many colors in the world. Despite Pantone’s claims to “invent” new colors, many of today’s designers are obsessing less about which exact PMS to specify, and more about how transparent it should be. Chromatic Gels is a trend that is finding traction from Architecture to Furniture:...

One of the most exciting endeavors for designers in any category is the chance to work with a completely new medium. By exploring the unique nature of a novel material, or employing a new manufacturing process to an existing material, new materials and processes bring the potential of incredibly unique...

The BioTech trend evolved as structural and material technologies began to intersect directly with the human form. Instead of considering tools as being externally operated by the human body, this aesthetic mode seeks to harmonize technology with the human form, creating a symbiotic relationship that is present in footwear, body-worn...

Iconic designs can embed themselves as powerful symbols in our minds, having the mental stickiness to persist for decades in our collective memory. An icon can be created via any type of design element: pattern (like Burberry tartan), color (Kodak Yellow or John Deere Green), or brand mark (the Google...

The Reinterpretation category is all about manipulating a single visual attribute to achieve something both familiar and fresh at the same time. In this instance, Material Reinterpretation generally maintains all aspects of an iconic object’s form, proportions, and surfacing, but introduces a completely new material or production process to the...

Although rainbows have been a frequently occurring visual theme in modern culture (kid’s characters, hippies, the GLBT community, Mork), in recent years they have been increasingly present in the Product, Fashion, Furniture, and Architecture categories. Possible reasons behind this resurgence are many (these colors are particularly vibrant against today’s prominent...

In keeping with the theme of the Juxtaposition category, this trend highlights the use of an intense color accent to contrast with a more muted primary color palette. The result is an immediate first-read dissonance that makes the accent color really pop as a vibrant element in an otherwise orderly...

Throughout our collective history, across all cultures, and in all types of products, the inspiration provided by the natural world around us has found its way into our artifacts. The pendulum always swings from strictly literal motifs to more abstract inspirations: even some of our first recorded artworks like the...

Although achievable easily in oils and watercolors, the gradations we see in the natural world around us have always been hard to replicate in production. The first explorations of gradation appeared in print with the invention of half-tone patterns. Not until digital tools arrived in the late 20th century did...