Tag Archives: form

This emerging trend is easy to describe: 1: visualize  form, 2: make with wire. Some of Alexander Calder’s earliest works in the mid-20th century were wire sculptures, where a single piece of wire was bent using only hands and pliers into thousands of different forms, from portraits to animals (eventually...

The use of Arcs and Ellipses to define physical shapes is a Declining Trend. For some perspective on this form/graphic design element’s origin: designers in the mid to late 1990s were extremely fond of putting arcs and ellipses on anything that wasn’t nailed down. The advent of 3D CAD modeling...

Many ways to define a form are emerging that break away from the standard 2-piece clamshell that is common in all design categories. In the case of Modular Elements, the form is created through an assemblage of smaller forms: modules that stack and nestle together to construct a larger volume,...

Every product, in every category, in every era has a certain established architecture that serves as the foundational structure for the product’s design. The origin of this architecture is usually highly evolutionary, building incrementally upon previous successful iterations until an optimized pattern emerges. Modern cars still have four wheels, one...

The idea of bending planar materials into three-dimensional forms has been around for decades, primarily through the Eames’ work in the furniture category. The technique is extremely simple: take a material that lends itself to bending or forming, and use that simple process to define and enclose a form. In...