Design Resource 2: Free stock video and photos from Pexels

What is Pexels?

Pexels is a similar website to unsplash, that is they offer compleatly free stock photos. But unlike unsplash they also offer free stock videos! So when I need videos in any project I head to pexels.

So what can I do with these photos and video?

Photos and videos from pexels are free to be used both for personal and commercial purposes, so you can use them in social media, your website, youtube videos or anywhere else you can think of! I don't have nearly as much saved in my collection on pexels compared to my unsplash, but theres some fun stuff and I'm always adding more. All the photos featured in this post can be found there!

What's great about pexels?

Pexels is a great resource for free stock video. Even though they have a smaller library of photos than unsplash, I often find really fun and interesting photos on pexels. If you are looking for the best pictures to use its worth looking at more than one place to get photos that are best suited for your project!

Thanks for reading!

Design Resource 1: Free stock photos from Unsplash

What is unsplash?

Unsplash is a website that offers compleatly free gorgeous stockphotos from a library of over 2 million high resolution photos from what they themself call "the world's most generous community of photographers". The photos don't at all look like typical tacky stockphotos, theres tons of beautyful photos with all kinds of motifs and styles.

So what can I do with these photos?

Photos from unsplash are free to be used both for personal and commercial purposes, so you can use them in social media, blog posts, ads, powerpoint presentations and anywhere else you would like to use lovely photos. While it ofc is best to take your own photos, using some appropriate stockphotos can be a great option.

There's so many photos, how can I find the good ones?

Just make a bunch of searches and collect any image you like to your collection. Im often browsing unsplash and saving pics to various boards. If you want some help you are welcome to look at some of the collections I made on unsplash! If you look around in my collections you can find all the photos featured in this post.

Great free resource!

If you need some beautiful photos its hard to go wrong with unsplash. It has a huge library, works on mobile and is 100% free. It's my number one go to when I'm in need of some stock photos.

Thanks for reading!

Brand Design Study: Beauty Pie

What is Beauty Pie?

Beauty Pie is a cosmetics brand that markets themselves as a "luxury beauty products Buyers’ Club". Basically they explain that they sell the same quality products as other luxury brands but instead of spending money on marketing, celebrity endorsements and by selling directly to customers instead of selling thru retailers. Beauty Pie has transparent pricing and offers products for 80% less than typical pricing. Though to buy from Beauty Pie they require that you become a member which works kindof like a subscription, but you get pay a set amount every month that rolls over and you can choice which products to order for those credits whenever you want to. Even with this they are quite affordable.

beauty pie, cosmetics, branding, design study, pink, minimalist, mintoiro, jennifer carlsson, skincare, beauty

Does that minimalist packaging design look familiar?

If you are at all paying attention to high end skincare in the last years this style of packaging is probably very familiar to you. This style has been adopted by a lot of luxury cosmetics brands and the visual style can also be found in many other industries. Some popular brands are Herbivore, Byredo and French Girl

Minimalist Labels

There is a common pattern to the look of this minimalist style that Beauty Pie fits neatly into. They have black plain sans serif font (in this case futura). Its neatly arranged into a small, medium and large composition. With the the brand name as the medium at the top, the name of the product as the large in the middle and the small being a longer text at the bottom with more information about the product. The text is on a solid color background, most commonly used is white but a fair amount use pale pastel solid colors or invert the colors using white on black text. For clear bottles a lot of brands opt for a white sticker label with the black text on it but Beauty Pie instead has just the text making the contents of the bottle the background. Which is also fairly common but not as common.

Black and white, but add pink!

A common favorite is using pink as an accent colour to compliment the black and white. Any accent colours used with this style will really pop against the simple design and many brands take advantage of this. Beauty Pie's brand palette consists of pure black, pure white, three shades of pink and a light grey. They also use green, baby blue and orange for some of their product lines.

Beauty Pie's colour palette

Beauty Pie's Plantastic product line

Style of photography

Beauty Pie's photos usually have a simple plain color background. They have flat lighting with sharp shadows. They use a lot of pink in most of their photos.

My thoughts on Beauty Pie

I really like their packaging design and their branding. They are clear with what they are selling and why you would want it. Of the minimalist cosmetics brands packaging I've seen this is one of my favorites.

Beauty Pie

Thanks for reading!