
Monkey Business Design Philosophy
- Written by Ville Keksijä Keränen
- Published in Archive, English
- Permalink
We are working on building a new lay out for our blog (and there’s a blog in Finnish coming up too!) and for that process I wrote out some of the design philosophy down. This is version 0.5 BETA but I thought I should still drop it out for you. Here’s the classic banana with classes drawn by Lady My of MyJok back in late 2007.
1. Our mission is to make the world more fun and yellow. Our design are also fun and colorful.
1. Things are as they look and feel to a person. Not as somebody intents them to be but as someone experiences them.
1. All yellow is good. Our graphics don’t need to follow one clearly defined pattern or a set of rules, but part of our brand is that the visuals change a lot.
2. A Banana drawn by Lady My is the banana for us. We will stick to that until something totally explosive comes to our way.
3. All monkeys and bananas are part of our design strategy.
4. Our graphics should be aligned with our style. That is yellow, playful and sincere. Our Graphics and Designs should enhance the same message.
6. We like skateboarders, clothing designers, surfers, musicians and other party people in general. The idea is to enjoy life and have fun. Our designs should also follow that ideology. We search for ideas and inspiration everywhere but nature and pop culture especially.
7. We like to promote a wide range of designs and designers. We work with people we like and think are cool. We want to have loads of different designs.
Have a yellow weekend everyone!
Ps. The book recommendation of this week is by Hugh MacLeod and is called ”Ignore Everybody – and 39 other keys to creativity.” I read it over the summer and is a quick read and gave me quite a few insights. There loads of good quotes and even more insightful drawings. Some of the things he writes and draws seems a bit cynical to me but he cleared it all by saying this: ”Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle i.e. being human.” That’s the spirit I guess. You can read plenty of samples of the book at Hugh’s website.