A zine to honour pop culture's favourite dessert

Designed as a part of Bruce Mau Design's Word of the Week creative exercise for the prompt "Cake", Brendan Irving Provisional RGD shares the zine he created to honour pop-culture's favourite dessert and its many cameos in film, art and visual media.

BMD's Word of the Week is a recurring internal creative exercise intended to give their designers a space to play, explore and connect with each other without the pressures of day-to-day client work. 

Each week, a single word is given to the team that serves as a prompt for them to create ANYTHING. There are no restrictions. From design to fine art to music to photography to sculpture to bookmaking, each designer interprets the word in their own way and shares it with the group the following week.

"These exercises allow our designers to have a moment of complete freedom over what they make, fostering moments of discovery, constructive critique and exciting conversation along the way. It also gives our creative directors insight into their passions and strengths, unearthing valuable information that we can nurture in them for future projects at the studio," offers Alex Boland RGD, Creative Director at BMD.

Completed over a course of two days, Brendan's project began with a rapid-fire brainstorm of all the times he could remember seeing an image of a cake in the media. From movies to music videos to paintings and more. This prompted him to source a collection of images and think about the overall visual tone of the zine.

Inspired by the pastels used for the movies The Grand Budapest Hotel and Marie Antoinette, Brendan chose a candy-coloured palette to lean into the dessert's aesthetic. However because there were more categories of work he wanted to showcase, he divided the book into sections using large-scale typography to bring a sense of dynamism to the layouts.

The results demonstrate Brendan's love for visual culture in a zine that seeks to play with type, image and colour. He hopes this inspires others to start noticing patterns in the everyday things they like and encourages them to pursue personal work as an outlet of creativity, for overall growth and for the fun of it.

Fun fact! There is no historical evidence to prove that Marie Antoinette ever said "Let them eat cake!".