When Dave the Incredibly Talented Designer met Canvas Page Builder

You may have already heard that we’re crazy excited about our new Canvas Page Builder extension. We think it’s truly ace. Spectacular. And dare we say it, awesome.

Amongst our excitement, we managed to get a hold of ourselves long enough to think that maybe we’d better get someone else to road test it a bit. That would be the sensible thing to do.

Cue Dave the Incredibly Talented Designer. As much as we’d like to think we have amazing, as yet undiscovered design skills – the hard truth, is that we really don’t. And so we bestowed our precious Canvas Page Builder to Dave the Incredibly Talented Designer and asked him to let rip.

The brief was pretty much, ‘take a day, have a play and see what you come up with’.

So Dave the Incredibly Talented Designer, swiftly plucked a really cool concept out of thin air and decided to base the designs on some of Josef Müller-Brockmann’s classic layouts.

Brockmann is perhaps the most well-known Swiss designer and authored several highly regarded books including Grid Systems in Graphic Design (we didn’t know this until Dave explained it to us. Told you he was incredibly talented).

Here’s how Dave the Incredibly Talented Designer and Canvas Page Builder got on.

The designs aim to show the power of the plugin to create clean effective designs in a short space of time
Dave the Incredibly Talented Designer

The first two designs are interpretations of the layouts from that famous book (Grid Systems in Graphic Design pages 129 & 131) and the second two are more literal takes on his concert posters for the Tonhalle in Zurich. The designs are by no means pixel perfect reproductions of the originals but aim to show the power of the plugin to create clean effective designs in a short space of time.

Cool example #1: Walter Gropius Remix

JMB_1
Cracking example #2: The New Swiss Film Remix

new swiss film
Smashing example #3: Junifestkonzert 1957 Switzerland

1957
Stupendous example #4: Tannhauser Bluthochzeit 1966 Switzerland

zurich

[box type=”tick”]Canvas Page Builder is a powerful yet simple Page Builder for WooThemes Canvas. Say goodbye to long confusing pages of shortcodes & unnecessary plugins. Say hello to speed and creativity. Canvas Page Builder is available from the PootlePress store now for $49[/box]

Comments

5 responses to “When Dave the Incredibly Talented Designer met Canvas Page Builder”

  1. Caroline Avatar
    Caroline

    OMG These designs are awesome! Off to buy Canvas Page Builder right away!

    1. Jamie Marsland Avatar
      Jamie Marsland

      Brill, tks Caroline 🙂

  2. […] Page Builders let you construct highly complex page layouts without having to know any code. Check out what happened when we gave our friend ‘Dave the incredibly talented Designer’ Canvas Page Builder for the day. […]

  3. This is a great example of showing how classic print layouts can be reproduced in electronic media. And therein lies the problem…

    Designers of old knew the print sizes (or at least the aspect ratios) they were working to. Web designers do not (in extremis, widescreen to iPhone). What screen were these designs designed to ‘fit’?

    What would be a more interesting and valid experiment would be to take one or more of these classic designs and rework it as a fully responsive design. With an incredibly talented designer talking about the necessary compromises involved, how to keep the ‘essence’ of the original, how to think about the aesthetics as well as the technicalities.

    It can’t harm to teach your clients how to use your tools can it?

    1. Good idea CP! Would make a good tutorial at some point!

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