A little industrial, a little gritty, Urban is a developing graphic trend on current male card designs with a huge potential to build on.
Drawing inspiration from city landscapes and textures and 1950s Brutalist architecture, the Urban trend combines strong graphics and silhouettes from the city environment and softens them, and this visual vessel is bubbling onto male card designs.
Tough stone, angular architectural lines and pared down cityscape forms, evolving into dramatic geometric shapes, contrast with vibrant metallic foiling on a plethora of this year’s male greeting card designs. Rosanna Rossi’s new Debonair range of 24 masculine birthday, relations and age cards is a stunning example of the Brutalist architectural form deconstructed, with its cubes and geometrics and metallic foil.
Saffron’s Dapper range strips back the substratal form of city buildings further with its dramatic geo patterns and tonal designs in black, teal and turmeric yellow. “The Dapper range explores a variety of themes and lifestyle trends suitable for the modern gentleman; the city explorer,” explains the range’s artist, Gurinder Bahia. “Paul Smith’s use of colour blocking and monochrome with highlights of bright colours has inspired this range, as has popular city imagery (such as the grid systems) of Paris and New York, and its skyscrapers, to form bold and strong geometric graphics,” Gurinder adds.
Knight, a brand new male card range from Hammond Gower, captures the Urban trend’s raw aesthetic with its stripped-down and edgy representation of classic male lifestyle themes and textured gold foiling. Hammond Gower’s marketing manager, Bryony Lancaster says: “We wanted to create a range that would be reminiscent of traditional masculine aesthetics, and used a rich colour palette which would evoke dark wood and full-bodied red wines. At the same time, we’ve given the range a contemporary twist with gold foil detail, which also hints to the chrome and brass finishes that are so popular in the Urban trend in interiors for 2017.”
Textural rock, smooth cement or stone, combined with hexagonal, rhombus or cube shapes, enhanced with copper, gold or brass foiling, is at the visual heart of the Urban trend. Belly Button Designs’ new male range Noir has ‘quarried’ opulent textures and materials, such as marble, for inspiration, accompanied by a palette of copper.
As a carpenter’s daughter, Sara Burford from Cinnamon Aitch has explored the aesthetics of wood and combined this with a masculine edge in the Veneer card range. “Inspired by modern architectural form and its strong geometric planes and facets, I was also influenced by interior trends of minimalism and deconstruction. In this striking range, recognisable form has been reduced to simple geometric shapes and rearranged into unique abstract compositions. Using beautiful wood grain in warm and rich tones for pattern and contrast, and a delicate but controlled use of stitch, Veneer makes a bold visual statement,” explains Sara.
