Thinking Green in SIGG Design

 

A Mini-Lesson in Successful Design

Rows and rows of little grey people, and only one who is any different from the crowd… but just one person is sometimes all it takes, right?

Ecological thinking starts from within the individual and spreads through communities to create global change

That’s the message behind Jessica Weninger’s SIGG bottle design, Thinking Green. Her design won SIGGart’s What’s Your Eco-Style contest (about which I wrote when it kicked off) and will go on sale at mySIGG.com and Patagonia this fall.

A Mini-Lesson in Successful Design

There’s a design lesson here!

It’s called the power of repetition. And it can apply equally to everything from garden or landscape design, to urban planning, to how you might select and arrange your knick-knacks.

A grouping of a number of similar objects has much more visual impact than a scattered collection of this and that. I think we all know that?

But this doesn’t mean going all matchy-matchy!

For example, you might choose to group together a number of blue glass vases. One might be tall and fluted; another might be square and severly unadorned; a third might be downright baroque with scrolls and curlicues. No matter. The unifying factor here would be the repetition of colour and material — blue glass.

Go too far with repetition, however, and the overall design can be dull, uninspiring, monotonous… Take a look at a really attractive suburban neighbourhood. You’ll see that the homes tend to be in one general style. A well-planned neighbourhood seldom will have a ranch house on one lot and a mock-Tudor right next to it.

Yet, are the houses all exactly alike, identical, right down to a hanging basket of red petunias by the front door?

No, not unless it’s one butt-ugly and soul-destroying place, designed for zombie robots!

Look back at Jessica’s SIGG design, just for a second, with that in mind — deceptively simple at first look (oh yeah, I could’ve done that!), it’s actually a graphic with a sophisticated structure.

Repetition of line or form or colour or substance or elements — the little bland people figures, in this case — attracts the eye in a restful and satisfying way. And then that punch of green serves as a sudden focus — a wake-up call to convey that strong environmental message that we’ve come to associate with the SIGG brand…

Now, isn’t that just so clever?

Congratulations, Jessica —
Nice job!