Crunch Digital Designs

What's the first thing you see when you wake up? The color of your sheets? When you look out the window, what do you see? The blue sky or the green grass or the orange leaves or the white snow? When you look at your phone and open your favorite app, does it load a dark screen, or white screen, or pink screen?

Color is everywhere. It surrounds us. It's in our homes. It's on our screens. It's in our clothes. And everything we see has a different effect on us: some colors can make us sad, while others can make us feel happy. Other colors can make us feel excited and energetic—and some can even make us feel disgusted! Color is powerful.

Color is amazing because of how it affects each and every one of us differently. But no matter what color it is, it can affect everyone at once. That's why color is such an important part of branding: psychologists have proven that the right color combination can help a company establish a brand personality and make their customers remember them better than their competitors.

When we think of the ancient Greeks, we think of marble columns, statues, and sun-bleached temples. We think of the great philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. What we don't think about are snails and purple dye. But it turns out snails were pretty important to the ancients.

The way tyrian purple was found was by Hercules dog eating a snail on the beach and his mouth stained with purple dye afterwards. It took about 12,000 snails to create 1.4 grams of pure dye. The dye was worth more than gold in weight. Only the highest ranking officials could wear this purple dye. Julius Cesar for example was among the few who wore this dye.

Sadly, the way to create this dye has been lost and the population of snails that produced it have been reduced to 1,600 left. Luckily, William Perkin made a recipe that was snail free and the color was called Mauve!

The creative process can be a bitch sometimes. You start a project and get really inspired, then halfway through your design you realize it sucks. Then you end up feeling like you just suck, and that's the story at least for most people. But that doesn't have to be the end of your story anymore, or anyone else's.

You will find that when you keep pushing to make something great, it ends up turning out even better than you imagined—even if it looks like a mess at first! That applies to anyone and anything, not just design.

We all have the ability to do whatever we want in this life, no matter what other people say or think about us. Don't let someone else's opinion keep you from pursuing your dreams. Just keep pushing through and eventually your hard work will pay off. And remember: YOU CAN DO ANYTHING!

The concept of ugly is subjective. In design, it can be a lot more than that: it can be used as a tool to get a conversation going. “Ugly design” sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not.

Why? Because if you come across something (anything) that is ugly, you have to pause and take notice—and in our fast-paced world of social media, politics, and mass consumerism, it’s important that we stop and reflect once in a while.

So what is “ugly design”? It’s design that purposefully looks bad. That sounds contradictory (”How can something be ugly and good at the same time?”), but think about it this way: When you come across something (anything) that is ugly—and I’m not saying this is true of the example below—you have to pause and take notice.

Consider some of the most famous examples of “ugly design”—the album art for Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” the covers of Black Sabbath albums—or even your favorite album art: There are serious conversations to be had just by looking at them.

When I create a graphic design for social media, there’s always a hidden meaning behind it. I always have a sneaky message that hints at something bigger than just the aesthetic of the design. That’s one of my favorite parts about creating graphics—I get to be artistic and also get to make a statement. As an artist, this is important to me because even if you don’t like how my graphic looks, you might still be able to appreciate my hidden message.