Less Is More
Three questions, three brands, one shape, one color, one line each.
A speculative brand-strategy poster series spanning three industries at once: hospitality (Airbnb), ecommerce and logistics (Amazon), and media (YouTube). The brief I gave myself: pick a question big enough that each company’s own board would argue about it, then answer it with as little as possible. One color, one black silhouette, one line of type. No props to hide behind.
Solo. Concept, illustration, and type, across all three.
Key decisions
- 01Airbnb got coral because the question was about workspaces people actually live in, and coral feels domestic in a way a tech blue never would.
- 02Amazon got amber, the color of every delivery box that’s ever shown up at your door. The poster is delivery boxes, so the color had to be too.
- 03YouTube got a flat sports-jersey green, because "collaborative learning" needed to feel like a study group, not a keynote.
- 04Every poster gets exactly one silhouette. If an idea couldn’t survive being reduced to a single human shape, it wasn’t finished yet.
- 05The three posters share a family of background linework, close enough that they read as siblings, different enough that none of them is a copy-paste of the last.
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sid.design Can Airbnb redefine booking workspaces? One question, one shape, one color. 🧡
Poster one, the workspace question.
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sid.design Can Amazon crack repair & refurbish? A stack of boxes says more than a paragraph.
Poster two, the delivery question.
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sid.design Can YouTube make learning collaborative? A desk, a green field, no question mark needed.
Poster three, the learning question.
Each of these started as a paragraph, a real debate a product team could plausibly be having. The rule I set was brutal on purpose: strip the paragraph down to a single question, then answer that question with one silhouette and one color, nothing else allowed to carry meaning. Most drafts died at the second color. The ones that survived are the ones where the shape alone told a stranger what the poster was about before they read a word.
Stacked like a print run, and swiped through like a carousel. The same three posters, two different physical lives.
This is the project I’d defend without notes in an interview. It also taught me that "less" is a harder constraint than "more." Cutting the fourth color is a lot harder than adding it.
