Breaking Out of the Gray Square: How Westward Studio is Designing Beyond the Norm
The landscape of art and design is known to be a fleeting environment where time is telling and what goes over one person’s head or beyond their scope is another’s bread and butter. Colorful, saturated and full of niches and established categories alike, art and design is a domain refreshed by current innovations and trends which more often than not require space and time apart to be viewed objectively. Think acid wash jeans and ornate serif-style wordmarks - which exist to show that taste is constantly living and changing amongst us, all while nothing seems to ever fully go out of style. The internet and access to information has played a tremendous role in the current goings of our industry. With the digitization of content taking part in our daily practices and communications, trends emerge and die like brushfire, and while personal palettes, preferences and visual information have expanded at an all-time high it is a lot to take in, so much so that simplicity stands out and slow content with delayed gratification sounds enticing.
It has been found that over time, even with all of the inspiration and source material at our own fingertips to riff off of, the world seems to be ‘grayer’ and ‘squarer’ than ever. In contrast to renaissance-style maximalism, we have found and adopted a safe space within tones of grey, added sans to serif, clarified our logos with vector art and the buildings we live and work in are rectangular with bird spokes as trim rather than ornate detailing done by an architect with a legacy long-forgotten. Homogenization seems to be a natural side effect as populations increase, content is algorithmically ‘for you’, audiences become typified and it becomes easier for people to access what is cheap, what is popular or what is of ‘value’ momentarily. Despite this, the overarching consensus of content consumption is that people still desire to create and admire beautiful and interesting things, with eyes for aesthetics and messages to deliver and receive, but in our world where expression once roamed triumphant and free, functionality has taken a firm seat.
Side by side comparison of our buildings now, compared to our buildings then.
When it comes to our work here at Westward, we sit right along the cutting edge of developments within our industry, seeing firsthand the requests of clients, visual directions and emerging stories that are at the precipice of being told. Our job is to fit to size a visual identity for clients of cross-sectional industries, and essentially tailor the appearance, language, and emotionality of a brand in a way that has never been done before. Taking inspiration as reference rather than reliance, we create bespoke functional art that contributes to the side of building a world with more variety and color, so that the future can look different and better than it ever did before. We look forward to seeing you there!
