The Best 10 Brands, Products & Designs In The World… Probably; Part One

Our agency mantra has been stolen from the great architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; ‘Less is more’.

It couldn’t be simpler, we believe that you achieve more when you do less. That doesn’t mean less work, it just means working smarter not harder to get to a pure and simple result. Great design is the result of clean thinking with no bells or whistles. Making something simple is incredibly difficult. That is the reason why as humans we are so impressed by good design.

Above: BTL Brands' founder, Stu Lewin

Somewhere in our sub-conscious we know how to recognise good design and when we see it, we just know that it works. We appreciate that a designer has sweated and toiled over a design concept, stripping away the noise, clutter and mess, trimming the fat until nothing is left except good design. It’s not too far from the process that a sculptor follows… chipping away at an ugly block of heavy material until something light and ethereal is formed underneath.

Putting together a top 10 list of anything is always going to be impossible. Our opinions will always be in a state of flux. It’s worth stating that loud and clear right now. It’s like making a list of your favourite bands or games, the list changes according to how you are feeling that specific day and specific time. Today, at 10am on a Friday morning in April 2018, myself and the team at BTL Brands think the first halk of our top 10 list would go something like this…

10. Obama's Hope campaign

Shepard Fairey was already a cult figure in the world of design when he created the iconic HOPE posters for the Obama campaign in 2008. It was a self-initiated project by a designer and artist who wanted to contribute towards the Obama movement. Some political observers have credited Fairey with being fundamental in getting Obama elected to the White House.

Image by Shepard Fairey

Fairey helped make Obama cool and relevant for the all-important young voters, the ones who usually don’t bother turning up at the polling stations as they feel side-lined and alienated by the usual political rhetoric. The young crazy ones that are digital-savvy and influential on social media. The Hope campaign was different. What Fairey did was just one small part of the Obama Hope jigsaw. A series of simple posters using back-to-basics screen printing and classic graphic design layouts. Something so simple but so effective.

9. The Aeron chair

Herman Miller, well, the original designer for Herman Miller called Bill Stumpf, came to the rescue in our studio a couple of weeks ago. All of the team had been suffering from lower back pain in silence and it wasn’t until one of us started complaining one day that we all realised that we had the same symptoms. The penny dropped that the problem was down to our cheap, cool chairs! It was time to bite the bullet and spend some good money on some good design.

The obvious choice was the Aeron, but was it really worth all of that extra cash compared to the £100 John Lewis chair? Just think how many IKEA chairs we could get for the price of one Aeron! Herman and Bill did not let us down. The chairs look great and feel great. You really do have a design experience when you sit in an Aeron.

What Herman and Bill have achieved doesn’t happen every day. They are up there with James Dyson. The very small and selective club of designers who have created a new product so great that we no longer refer to their work as an ‘office chair’ or ‘bagless vacuum cleaner’, we use a ‘Dyson’ to clean the studio and an ‘Aeron’ to sit on in the studio.

8. The CO-OP branding

North Design did a great job of decluttering the CO-OP logo. They were given the task of rescuing the brand, which for so many years has been diluted, distressed and almost destroyed. North has gone back to the roots of the iconic clover leaf brand and reinstated its Nordic values. They haven’t messed with it but tried to put their own twist or turn on it. They haven’t tried to jazz it up or make it ‘Millennial-friendly’ or ‘future-proof’ - the usual jargon you hear at new design launches. They have just made something good great but doing as little as possible by enhancing the good stuff and removing the bad stuff. Very Scandinavian.

7. The LG Smart TV interface

This is a bit random, but we really like the interface of the LG smart TV. It’s one of the key reasons for making the purchase, along with the usual anorak resolution, size, and spec, etc. We realised that we were unconsciously shopping for the best TV interface. LG has based their design around this diagonal angle and it makes up the menu you see when you’re scrolling through the TV’s apps horizontally. Even the horizontal scrolling is innovative as it takes advantage of the TV’s width to see more menu items at once. It looks and feels like a lot of thought and good design has gone into the interface, and it is appreciated.

6. Squarespace

We are huge fans of Squarespace, it’s official. Their brand identity is a true reflection of their personality. They seem to take a back seat and push the websites created by their clients forward. Whenever we land on their homepage at the start of a new project we always feel inspired to create. We believe it’s their generous use of white, to give you the sense you’ve landed onto a big blank digital canvas full of possibility. If you were to ask one of us to draw the Squarespace logo from memory, we probably wouldn’t be able to.