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@ DeSign_r
2025-05-13 06:42:47Using form, color, typography, and art direction, designers create entire worlds around fragrance – translating scent into sight, touch, and story. But how do you design for something you cannot see? And can design help us smell what we see?
Does design have a smell? While sight, touch, and even taste have long been intertwined with aesthetics, scent remains a more elusive medium – intangible yet profoundly evocative. In a screen-based world, scent has to be seen before it’s smelled – meaning design does more heavy-lifting. Unlike the olden days of magazine inserts spritzed with perfume, scent no longer leads the experience. Instead, branding has to translate fragrance into something we can see, study, and feel. But how do you give form to the formless? Can design make us smell what we see?
Fragrance has always been a playground for aesthetic exploration. Perfume branding has historically been an exercise in worldbuilding; desire is conjured through design. Think of David Lynch’s commercial for YSL’s Opium, a hypnotic fever dream of saturated reds and oranges and surreal imagery, where the perfume becomes almost mythical – more ritual than product. Or take vintage Guerlain ads, whose painterly compositions and opulent typography evoke a world of old-money glamour and whispered intrigue. Here, design and art direction don’t just encode meaning; they heighten the fantasy. The aesthetics transcend the physical product to sell a feeling, an atmosphere – a dream.
Continue reading at https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/designing-for-scent-branding-graphic-design-feature-240425
originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/978832