Trends List
http://www.trendlist.org
On this website, there are tags for different trends that appear online. I have screenshot the most common examples I have seen.
IK Blue
International Klein Blue is dark ultramarine blue color, well-known due to French artist Yves Klein. The intensive color become very popular not only in graphic design, but also in fashion.
Left, Right, Up & Down
This typography trend consists of placing words on the sides of the format. Composition seems so avant-garde, but it has one major disadvantage. It forced people to read in four different directions. which can be fun, but not everytime.
Exposed Content
One of the most popular current trends, usually seen on book and magazine covers, where images are located in different compositions and reveal the inner content. This kind of design goes very well together with visuals for the art exhibitions where all the artworks are indexed on one poster. Typography is usually placed over this layer.
Scanned
Distorted typography is achieved by using a scanner. Experimental output guaranteed.
Slash
Maybe the most trendy shape ever. Slash appears as a diagonal stroke from one corner to the opposite. It goes across the whole bookcover or poster, more often from left to right.
Various Formats
One book is complied from different sizes of pages and various types of paper. Sometimes is separates whole printed matter to independent parts like chapters for example. This form is sometimes so overused, that book or catalog that has lost its function and there is no way not browse it easily.
Type On A Path
Stars
The fascination with the sky during the night returned and seems to be one of the contemporary trends. Often with infinity shapes, triangles or thin lines aligned in the central composition. It is interesting that this trend is mostly associated with music.
Stretched Typography
Countries Setting Trends:
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Creative Review - The New Ugly
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2007/august/the-new-ugly
Posted by Patrick Burgoyne, 30 August 2007, 16:13
Following all the debate generated by our interviews with Super Super's Steve Slocombe and 032c art director Mike Meiré, here is the piece from the current issue of Creative Review which draws on those sources to set the work into a wider context
Stretched type, day-glo colours and a flagrant disregard for the rules: are we witnessing a knee-jerk reaction to the slick sameness of so much design or a genuine cultural shift?
In the early 90s, the mother of all rows blew up between, on the one hand, the traditionalist school of American designers led by Massimo Vignelli and, in defiant opposition, the avant garde of Emigre and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The catalyst was an essay in Eye magazine by Steven Heller entitled Cult of the Ugly, in which the world’s most prolific design writer took Cranbrook and its students to task over, as he saw it, their gratuitously ugly output. Well now, it seems, ugly is back.
Exhibit A: Wolff Olins’ 2012 Olympics logo. When finally wheeled out to confront an ever-more-hostile national press, Wolff Olins creative director Patrick Cox claimed that “Its design is intentionally raw, it doesn’t… ask to be liked very much. It was meant to provoke a response, like the little thorn in the chair that gets you to breathe in, sit up and take notice.”
In addition, Wolff Olins’ chairman Brian Boylan claimed success for having “created something original in a world where it is increasingly difficult to make something different”. In other words, when we are surrounded by logos created to a slick, if mediocre, aesthetic standard, the only way to stand out is deliberately to reject those standards.
Which brings us to Exhibit B: the magazine that seemingly influenced Wolff Olins’ thinking – style magazine and New Rave progenitor, Super Super. Launched early last year, its art direction has been likened to “a clown being sick”. Its wilfully distorted typography, day glo colours and total rejection of the holy tenets of magazine design are enough to give more mature art directors a fit of the vapours. It’s MySpace made flesh, with all the clashing cacophony that concept brings to mind.
And yet, according to its creative director, Steve Slocombe, what underlines the magazine is “harmony”. “There is nothing in Super Super that is empty or frivolous,” he insists, “everything is there for a reason.”
When it comes to style magazines, Slocombe has form, having previously been editor of Sleazenation.. His last issue there (May 2003 which, incidentally, got him the sack) introduced the freeform approach that Super Super has taken to such troubling extremes. But, he says, it was a period working for photographer Wolfgang Tillmansthat most influenced his approach. A fine art graduate from St Martins, Slocombe’s role included helping Tillmans install his shows – a process that was, in itself, an artistic exercise. “We’d get a plan of the space and we’d turn up with work in all kinds of different sizes and respond to the space, arranging the work accordingly: it was an organic process about what work would sit best in certain situations,” he explains.
This, then, is the approach that he brings to designing Super Super. There is no predefined grid: Slocombe starts with the images (which may or may not be in focus) and arranges them so as to maximise the space, just as he and Tillmans would on the gallery wall. There are some rules: copy is set in blocks either 90mm or 40mm wide, at 10 point on 12 point leading or eight on 10, using either Helvetica or Times. But word and image rarely line up: “Things feel a lot more human if they are a fraction out,” Slocombe claims, “it’s about a sense of harmony and rhythm.” It’s what sets Super Super apart: “Magazines had become very machine-like, very impersonal. Super Super is very human. It speaks to the reader very directly, removes the barriers. The values of the magazine are to be fun, to be positive, to say ‘have a go, you can do this’.”
While other magazines may seek to manipulate pace by contrasting full-bleed images with more detailed spreads, Super Super tries to cram in as much as possible onto every available inch of space. The reason, according to Slocombe, is that its readers (typically aged between 14 and 24) are part of the “ADD Generation”. Their alarmingly short attention spans mean that they cannot be guaranteed to look at more than one spread in any particular issue, he claims, so each one has to embody all the values of the magazine. And, he says, they have a completely different idea about colour. If you are 30-plus, white may embody sophistication and expense, but to the Super Super “reader” it is colour that does this – bright colours and lots of them.
The magazine is not, Slocombe insists, anti-design. “That whole argument that you have to be either a follower of David Carson or of the Swiss School is not the debate we have now – I’ll take the best of both and anything else that’s around. The old way of things was movement followed by anti-movement, now the culture swallows the past and moves on instead of defining itself against what has gone before,” he argues. “I’m not against what may have gone before, I just think this is more appropriate for here and now. At the core of the Swiss ideal is efficient communication – well, this is the most appropriate way to communicate to our audience.”
The charitable view would be that Slocombe’s lack of formal design training has left him unencumbered by the profession’s history and therefore more able to seek out new forms of expression: the uncharitable view would be that Super Super is simply a mess, created for young kids who will move on to more sophisticated tastes as they mature. And yet the magazine’s core concerns – of seeking to inject some quirky humanity into a slickly homogenised magazine market, of being true to a vision deemed appropriate to the readership – are shared by a designer with a far more “establishment” pedigree. Which brings us to Exhibit C: Mike Meiré's recent redesign of German cultural magazine 032c.
Meiré is renowned in magazine circles for his art direction of Brand Eins, a German business magazine that mixed beautiful photography with classic typography and lots of white space. That was in 1999: since then, Meiré says he’s been waiting for an alternative approach to emerge, but to no avail. “There are so many magazines out there which pretend to be cool, sophisticated or even culturally relevant. They all look the same,” he says. “I became a bit tired of all these look-a-like magazines,” which, through Brand Eins, he helped create. “They’re all made very professionally but I was looking for something more charismatic. I wanted to search for an interesting look that was beyond the mainstream.”
The result is a magazine that, wrote designer Jeremy Leslie on his blog MagCulture, “uses typography and layouts that are hard to describe as anything but ugly. The pages feel thrown together. When I expressed my confusion about the redesign to the magazine’s founder/editor Joerg Koch,” continued Leslie, “I received a surprising reply. ‘Thanks for your message which made me incredibly happy! This is exactly what we wanted to achieve, this sort of engagement with a magazine where you question yourself if it makes sense, if it is really brilliant or simply daft.’”
Meiré readily admits that “Yes, I did deliberately set out to break rules with this and yes, it is a provocation – but in the first place to myself! If every magazine or every building or every brand or everybody tries to look appealing by using the same idea of being modern, it becomes interesting to go in the opposite direction, because life has different kinds of beauty to present. If people feel confused by it, it is because we are all so used to this kind of efficient, streamlined, correctness.”
In his original essay, Heller slammed those using ugliness as a knee-jerk reaction to the status quo. “Ugliness as its own virtue diminishes all design,” he said. All three projects cited here could be accused of such a crime. However, Heller also argued that ugliness “is not a problem when it is a result of form following function”. Though none of Wolff Olins, Slocombe or Meiré may feel comfortable with describing their work as ugly, they all lay claim to their pursuit of the latter.
“Making a magazine is about finding the right look for its content, its attitude,” Meiré argues. “To me it’s the only way to create a unique identity. [In doing so] maybe you don’t please the [mainstream] anymore – but you become who you are, authentic in your own way.”
This, it would seem, is the crux of the matter. If all three of these projects, and other contemporary works in the same vein, are merely an attempt to zig while the world zags, to be different for difference’s sake, then they need not detain us for long. If, however, they are the honest result of form following function and thereby represent the visual expression of a genuine cultural shift, then that becomes something altogether more interesting.
Take colour, for instance. Both the Olympics logo and Super Super propose a new relationship between colour and quality. That bright no longer necessarily equals trashy. That a younger generation is inverting the chromatic scale as it relates to notions of quality and class. Super Super claims to address the impact of changing patterns of media consumption on design. This, it says, is what happens when your “readers” are not readers at all but mere “scanners” of content who are as likely to start at page 46 as page one. And all three claim to be fired by a desire to involve their audiences rather than simply presenting themselves to them. Inevitably this would seem to require a move away from the slick and the forbidding, toward, as Slocombe describes it, something more “human”.
There is more than empty styling at work here. Something like Super Super can easily be dimissed as just a few kids messing about, but, as a recent piece on New Rave in The Sunday Times Style magazine noted, that’s pretty much how all trends start. All three projects are well-intentioned attempts to respond to and engage with a shifting cultural landscape. If this is the future, it may not be a pretty sight.
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Creative Review - Pretty Ugly or Plain Ugly
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2012/may/pretty-ugly-or-plain-ugly
Posted by Patrick Burgoyne, 23 May 2012, 11:25 
Poster for one of a series of weekly film nights run by artist Wim Lambrecht at college Sint-Lucas Visual Arts Gent from 2007 to 2008. Designed by Raf Vancampenhoudtwith Joris Van Aken
Skewed, stretched type, clashing colours, too little or too much spacing - across Europe a new generation of designers and art directors is breaking every rule. But is their work rebellion for rebellion's sake or does it have wider implications for visual communications?
The June issue of CR (out May 23) comes with a health warning. It contains content that readers of a nervous disposition and a love of classical typography may find disturbing. Things are going to get ugly.
Back in 2007, I wrote a piece suggesting that something new and decidedly strange was happening in graphic design and art direction, based mainly upon the look of two magazines: Super Super (spread shown above) and 032c. In it I referred to an earlier Eye essay by Steven Heller on what he termed the 'Cult of the Ugly'.
Heller was writing about the work coming out of Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 90s, work that deliberately sought to subvert our ideas of 'good design'. What I saw in Super Super and 032c could, I thought, herald a New Ugly aesthetic in response to changes in the way younger readers consumed information online and a desire to, once again, challenge the status quo.
From a series of posters for the Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks byBureau Mirko Borsche using a mixture of classical serif type (to represent tradition), and the angular bespoke face Andri12000, representing the orchestra's modern spirit and the musicians in evevning dress
Five years later comes the publication of Pretty Ugly, a new book that brings together graphic design, imagemaking and product design which very much delivers on that promise. In the Pretty Ugly, type is skewed, stretched and set at unreadable angles; images are distorted with a will; colours clash resoundingly. Some of it is beautiful, some interesting, some just awful.
Untitled. Design: Andrea Crews. Photography: Simon de la Poife, 2010
"It is a new kind of beauty that isn't based upon pure visual pleasure, it is a beauty based upon context-driven design, being transparent with working methods, tools and materials," claim the book's editors, Martin Lorenz and Lupi Asensio of Barcelona design studio TwoPoints.Net, who came up with the Pretty Ugly term to describe the 'movement' and who are interviewed in the new issue of CR.
CR interviews the editors of Pretty Ugly in the June issue of the magazine
Die Neue K is the free quarterly newspaper of the Royal Academy of Art at Leiden University. Design: Rob van den Nieuwenhuizen ( of Drawswords in Amsterdam) withMattijs de Wit
Contribution to the My Monkey, My Network group exhibition organised by arts group Le Club des Chevreuils in Nancy, France, designed by Pierre Delmas Bouly and Patrick Lallemand of Lyon-based Superscript, 2008
"There are obvious aesthetic qualities connecting the work," they say, "intentionally 'bad' typography; using system typefaces like Arial, Helvetica or Times; stretching them; having too much or too little letter or line spacing; deforming type on a scanner or a copier. The Pretty Ugly is a movement against the established criteria of what 'good design' is, in order to regain the attention of the audience and explore new territory. Entering the world of 'wrong' freed these designers and made any kind of experiment possible, without worrying about being thought unprofessional. Mistakes turned into virtuosity, a sign of authenticity and humanity. But it isn't a movement that does wrong because it doesn't know better. This is a highly educated generation of designers using their knowledge to break with what they were given as rules. They use intuition as much as intellect in order to enter new territory that is beyond so called 'professionalism'."
Hmmm, so we are into the "if I do it, it's meant to look bad, if you do it, it's just bad" territory, always tricky ground to occupy. Are we, the humble viewers and readers, meant to know the difference? Is there one?
German design studio Vier5 was one of the early pioneers of the Pretty Ugly, particularly in its work for French arts centre CAC Brétigny, including this 2003 poster for a show by Dutch artists, designers and architects Atelier Van Lieshout
Also by Vier5, the poster for last year's Chaumont poster festival
Geographically, most of the work featured hails from Belgium, France, Germany and The Netherlands. The latter gives a clue as to the work's intellectual origins too. Lorenz and Asensio say "We would guess that many of the seeds of the Pretty Ugly were sown in the Netherlands around 2000, when 'Default Design' was hot. At the time, the first issues of Jop van Bennekom's Re-Magazine using Times and lo-res images taken from the internet, or the work by Maureen Mooren (at that time working with Daniel van der Velden, who is now at Metahaven) and her husband Armand Mevis (working with Linda van Deursen) were all very influential. Many of the the designers featured in our book studied at the design school Werkplaats Typografie, where Armand Mevis teaches."
Spread from Super Paper, No. 21, July 2011, a publication on Munich nightlife by Studio Mirko Borsche
Perhaps the origins of the work also have something to do with the fact that these countries provide the support for young designers to be experimental - it's a rather different matter if you are leaving college with £20,000 of debt. Commercially viable work, in those circumstances, has its attractions and not too many brands, as yet, are in the market for 3D stretched Arial. Indeed, most of the work in Pretty Ugly is for very small-scale fashion, music or cultural clients, or self-initiated. But as the recent launch of Mevis and van Deursen's Stedelijk Museum identity (below) highlighted (see our story here), it is seeping into the mainstream.
Perhaps even the 2012 Olympics logo was an attempt to pick up on early manifestations of the trend and the intentions behind it? At the time of its launch Wolff Olins creative director Patrick Cox claimed that “Its design is intentionally raw, it doesn’t… ask to be liked very much. It was meant to provoke a response, like the little thorn in the chair that gets you to breathe in, sit up and take notice.”
In the US and UK many young designers have turned toward a retro craft aesthetic and a celebration of archaic print techniques - think of the US gig poster scene, much of the work exhibited at Pick Me Up or the Hipster aesthetic satirised so acutely onthis recent Tumblr. In comparison, the mostly Northern European approach of The Pretty Ugly feels much more daring and provocative.
Rather than retreating to the comfort of the past, this work seems calculated to upset as many purist notions as possible. It has great energy and verve, blowing away the cobwebs of the watered-down Modernism-as-style that has dominated our ideas of 'good design' for so long.
Horst is a German magazine focused on the lifestyles of modern gay men. Design: Mirko Borsche. Cover photograph: Alex Klesta. Illustration: Gian Gisiger
But is there anything more to it than empty rebellion? In Heller's original piece, he stated that "Ugliness as its own virtue diminishes all design" but that it is justified if it is as a result of form follows function. If the 'function' here is to kick over the traces and make us re-examine what 'good design' is then maybe it's working.
We live in an age where everything around us is (to an extent) competently designed: groceries, restaurants, magazines, medicines, all researched and marketed to the nth degree. A professional patina applied. Design as service industry. Compared to the buffed and primped identities of most major organisations, the Stedelijk identity feels refreshingly authentic and honest.
But here's the 'Emperor's New Clothes' rub with the Pretty Ugly - if it wasn't by a famous Dutch design studio and for a major institution, would we give it serious consideration? If we saw it on the side of a builder's van would it transform from Pretty Ugly to just plain ugly?
Proposals for signage using the new Stedelijk Museum identity system
There's something undeniably decadent in a group of highly and expensively educated Western designers producing knowingly 'bad' work. Are young designers, seeing their older peers' work becoming more and more devalued, reacting by saying 'these rules you taught us are not going to earn us a living anyway so let's see what happens when we break them all'? Increasingly we are hearing mumblings about a 'post-design world'. Is The Pretty Ugly a refreshing reinvigoration of a visual communications industry that has become too flabby and comfortable, or the outward sign of a profession in crisis?
Pretty Ugly: Visual Rebellion in Design, edited and designed by TwoPoints.Net, is published by Gestalten, €35
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Graphic Design: But Not As We Know It - A Biting Satirical Project From Amy West
http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/amy-west-grafik-bs
Amy West has just changed all that though with an acerbic piece of work based on the internet’s obsession with trends and style over substance. Grafik BS was a fake studio set up by Amy with the intention of catching out those with a superficial understanding of design and pointing the finger for a big old laugh. “A fake Behance page for the studio received hundreds of appreciations, positive comments on the style of the posters and even a job application for a position in the studio. The experiment proved that there is an online community practising design with the understanding that the entire process consists solely of applying style to anything,” said Amy.
Lucky for us we never posted any of Grafik BS’ work until now. Though come to think of it, I DO like the style of those posters…
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Default Systems In Graphic Design
http://blog.linedandunlined.com/post/404940995/default-systems-in-graphic-designA discussion between Rob Giampietro and Rudy VanderLans about guilt and loss in graphic design.
Rudy VanderLans, editor, Emigre: When writer/designer Rob Giampietro approached me a few months back with the idea to write an article about graphic design in the ’90s, he brought up an unrelated topic during our conversation that I found intriguing; he mentioned the term “Default Systems Design.” He said it was the topic for another article he had been working on for the past few months. It’s curious how certain ideas reach critical mass. In Emigre #64 a number of contributors, independently from each other, each made note of the emergence of a new kind of graphic design that seems to rely heavily on the use of systems and defaults. Just when you think graphic design is in a coma, something’s taking root. Reprinted here is how we arrived at the topic, as well as edited segments of the rest of the dialogue.
Rudy: If the level of graphic design criticism is at all a gauge for the state of design today, then design is as good as dead. We saw a surge of critical writing within design in the early ’90s. To some degree this had to do with the times; there was a significant change in technology (the introduction of the Macintosh computer) which coincided with (or caused?) the bankruptcy of the Swiss International Style. But, after many debates, everybody settled down and went about their business. I guess it’s difficult to forge a revolution (for lack of a better word), every ten years or so, or maintain a critical opposition indefinitely.
Rob Giampietro: While I understand your frustration, I would say such times of boredom and stagnation are times in which critical opposition is most crucial. It’s easy to be righteous when everyone thinks you’re right. It’s much harder when they’ve changed their minds.
Rudy: And that’s what you think has happened? Designers have become more conservative again, more in line with the status quo? Which is not surprising, of course. In times of economic and political uncertainty, when the future looks bleak, there seems to be a tendency to look back, to chose safe solutions. Within graphic design we’ve seen an upswing in retro themes, nostalgia, and the return of the Swiss International Style.
Rob: The look of graphic design today is evidence of the pendulum-swing back to more conservative and fiscal-minded times. It is a counter-revolution of sorts, and its assumptions are troubling, and real, and on MTV, and in Emigre itself.
Rudy: Why are its assumptions troubling?
Rob: Because this kind of work self-consciously positions design as stupid and trivial and says that documents of importance needn’t rely on design to shape them. Default Systems are machines for design creation, and they represent design publicly as an “automatic” art form, offering a release from the breathless pace at which design now runs, as clients ask for more, quicker, now. Default Systems are a number of trends present in current graphic design that exploit computer presets in an industry-wide fashion. They are a quasi-simplistic rule-set, often cribbing elements from the International Style in a kind of glossy pastiche, a cult of sameness driven by the laziness and comfort of the technology that enabled Emigre’s rise, the Macintosh.
Rudy: Do you think this was perhaps an obvious reaction to the hyper-personal, customized messages of early ’90s design?
Rob: Yes, in some part. What’s interesting is how much Default Systems owe to early ’90s design. The rejection of all systems by these “hyper-personal” designers was itself systematic. Fussiness for its own sake in the early ’90s is the same as reductivism for its own sake in the late ’90s and today. Designers from Cranbrook and those mentioned in Steven Heller’s “Cult of the Ugly” article were nothing if not brash and dogmatic. Their ideal of “beauty” was nothing if not relative. Their models, like those of designers using Default Systems, were found in “low” forms, and the ceaseless glorification of these forms was as self-indulgent then as it is now. The stylistic methods of Default Systems Design arose from the methods of Ugly Design and they are tactically one and the same. Both are based on different kinds of proliferation and limitation. The distinction between the two is largely formal, which is of interest to designers, but their social observations are largely similar, which is of interest to critics.
Rudy: This raises a few questions. First, what do you mean by “Both are based on different kinds of proliferation and limitation”? Secondly, how are the social observations of “Ugly” design and “Default Systems” design similar? What is it that they have in common?
Rob: These two questions are related. The use of terms like “proliferation” and “limitation” is self-conscious on my part. These terms sound as if they come from a Marxist critique rather than a design discussion. I’m not trying to make this discussion overly academic; rather, I am trying to provide design critics with a model for positioning design within a broader social context, which doesn’t always happen. The most interesting designs are critiques of the conditions of their own making, and Marxist language is useful for discussing the means of production and consumption because it was developed for that purpose.
I still haven’t answered your question, however. If, as I said above, the most interesting designs are critiques of the conditions of their own making, then both Ugly design and Default Systems design qualify as “most interesting.” Both exploit certain opportunities presented by the computer as a tool while suppressing other opportunities. Some tactics are allowed to proliferate while others are deliberately limited. For example, the computer is a tool that allows for incredible customization. Typefaces—even individual letterforms—can be altered to a user’s tastes. Ugly designers let this kind of customization run self-consciously amok. This was done in the name of a kind of democracy (every user is different) as well as a kind of authenticity (ugliness is pure and therefore true). What’s interesting is that although Default Systems design looks so different from Ugly design, its interests are still tied to being authentic and being democratic. Default Systems design claims, “This is how the computer works with minimal intervention.” It also claims, “By keeping the designer from intervening, this design language is made available to all.” So Default Systems look new, but they arise from the social concerns of the old. I’d call this “Hegelian,” but I wouldn’t want to make this discussion any more academic…
I suspect that Default Systems arose from a kind of shame that plagued designers after accusations that their work had become overly self-indulgent in the face of the limitless possibilities of desktop publishing and a certain version of Postmodernity. This notion finds its first theoretical articulation in Summer 1995, when Dutch critic Carel Kuitenbrouwer wrote in Eye of “The New Sobriety” creeping into work of young Dutch designers at that time.
Rudy: Can you describe some of the features and characteristics of this type of “Default Systems” design?
Rob: Defaults, as we both know, are preordained settings found in common design programs such as Quark, Photoshop, and Illustrator that a user (or designer) must manually override. Thus, in Quark, all text-boxes have a p1 text inset, unless one enters the default settings and changes this. Put simply, defaults automate certain aspects of the design process.
Default typefaces in contemporary design include all Macintosh System Fonts: Arial, Chicago, Courier, Times New Roman, Verdana, Wingdings, etc. Hallmark faces of the International Style that are seen as “uninflected” are also in this category: Helvetica, Akzidenz Grotesk, Grotesque, Univers, etc. Although the latter typefaces are far from meaningless, their original context is as neutral communicators, and this position is simultaneously supported and undermined by Default Systems Design.
Defaults also appear in terms of scale. Sameness of size downplays hierarchy and typographic intervention, forcing the reader to form his own hierarchical judgements. Default designers argue that this emphasizes reading over looking, making the audience more active, more embodied.
Default placements include centrality as a kind of bluntness and bleeds as a kind of eradication of layout. The center is a default position. One “drops” something in the center; one “places” something off-center. Asymmetric placement is embodied; central placement is disembodied. To bleed a photograph is to remove the page-edge as a frame and emphasize the photograph itself. Placements (or non-placements) such as these allow images and texts to function as such. They are expected. Computer templates and formats that employ Modernist grid aesthetics are also included here.
Default colors are black and white, the additive primaries (RGB) and the subtractive primaries (CMY). Default elements include all preexisting borders, blends, icons, filters, etc. Default sizes are 8, 10, 12, 18, 24 pt. in type, standard sheet sizes for American designers, ISO sizes for Europeans, etc. With standardization, it’s argued, comes compatibility. Objects (particularly printed objects) are reproduced 1:1, and images and documents are shown with minimal manipulation.
Rudy: Who stands out for you as Default Systems designers?
Rob: The Experimental Jetset, and issue #57 of Emigre that they designed. To publish their work in Emigre served to direct the attention of others to this undercurrent in design, but to mistake their work for anything more than a saccharinely ironic version of the International Style (shaken, not stirred) is to give it a kind of seriousness that their name itself eschews. Set entirely in Helvetica and using only process colors, standard sizes, and arrangements, the art direction of that issue is the epitome of “default.” The tone of its essays is jargony and somewhat academic, and the anti-design of the issue provides them with a “serious” backdrop from which to make their points. Included is an archive of data-storage formats that have now fallen into disuse, arranged according to their forms. In the center, bracketing the product catalog, Experimental Jetset sets up a bland joke: “Q: How many Emigre products does it take to change a lightbulb?” After leafing through 17 pages of products, the reader finds the punch-line: “A: Never enough.” The joke falls hopelessly flat, humorless. Other variants of the “lightbulb” joke repeat throughout the issue and are presented in ceaseless repetition, like lines of computer code. All are equally disjointed, equally unfunny. Though the joke is a format, the humanity of the joke format has been drained. It, too, is a lost format in need of preservation. Its unfunniness here manipulates us into feeling a kind of consumerist guilt over desiring the Emigre products within the bounds of its set-up and punch-line.
Daniel Eatock’s “A Feature Article without Content,” also comes to mind. The piece mocks a portfolio magazine feature article, demonstrating that expected placement is itself a kind of content.
Another example of Default System design is Issue #7 of Re-, dubbed “Re-View.” It is a self-described “review of a magazine and its formats”: cover, contents, review, short story, agenda, fashion, interview, and letters. “Re-View” aims to expose the expected and renders it available to all. The magazine itself has no content: it is an engine for content. “With texts to be written, not to be read, and pictures meant to be taken, not to be seen,” it is prescriptive and programmatic while it is descriptive and programmed. Rather following the traditional route of content leading design, here design leads content because the content is an admission of design’s role in generating meaning within the context of a popular magazine. Tactics such as art direction are removed from their everyday associations, and presented in a tone that may be mocking, gravely serious, or both. “Re-View”’s Art Director—capital “A,” capital “D”—is eerily similar to a Conceptual Artist—capital “C,” capital “A”—a “brain in a jar,” generating visual ideas via programs that are meant to be executed by others. This elevates design while dehumanizing it.
Rudy: You lost me here. How do you both elevate design and dehumanize it?
Rob: The linking of design and Conceptual Art is an attempt to elevate design to the “High Art” level of Conceptual Art. There is a difference between “making” and “generating.” By saying the role of the designer is to “make” an object, you are saying one thing; by saying the role of the designer is to “generate” a program by which objects can be made by others, you are saying something else. You’ve elevated what design produces—ideas, not things—but you’ve dehumanized it by taking the Maker out of the equation and substituting him with a Program. This is a natural leap for design that’s interested in the role the computer plays in the production process, because, at some point, the program is what’s making the design. But there is a spectrum, certainly. Design that veers closer to Conceptual Art than Computer Science strikes me as being less dehumanized. I may be oversimplifying, however.
Rudy: While I understand how you have come to use the term Default Systems Design, I can imagine that designers would have a problem calling their design methods “default.” The term has many negative connotations.
Rob: In most contexts, “to default” is to fail. To be “in default” on a loan is not to pay it; to “default” in court is not to appear; to win “by default” is to win because the other team did not play.
The only arena in which the definition of “default” is not entirely negative is in Computer Science, where a default is “a particular setting or variable that is assigned automatically by an operating system and remains in effect unless canceled or overridden by the operator.” Defaults, at least in terms of computers, are the status quo. Theirs is not the failure to do what’s promised but exactly the opposite. Theirs is a promise kept in lieu of an “operator’s” (or designer’s) intervention. To view a computer through its default settings is to view it as it’s been programmed to view itself, even to give it a kind of authority. Naturally, “a default” is produced by systemic thinking—the definition mentions “operating systems” specifically—and “defaults,” taken cumulatively, could be defined as the system by which the machine operates when no one is actively operating it. The system makes assumptions that, unchallenged, become truths.
Rudy: The use of default systems is not exactly a new phenomenon. It’s been a known process to generate work within the world of art. It seems graphic design, again, is coming to the scene late.
Rob: Well, yes and no. Design punishes itself for not being “on trend” too often and to no end. To do so is to be obsessed with style (which is a shallow effort) or to be obsessed with making design the same as art (which is a pointless effort). Anyone would be hard-pressed to identify a governing principle of a new aesthetic movement that wasn’t presaged in some form by a prior movement, especially if you include any genre you want. That said, defaults have been used to create art for a long time. In writing, the work of OuLiPo (Ouvroir Littérature Potentielle, “Workshop of Potential Literature”) comes to mind. Oulipian poetics ascribes a default system accommodating a series of constraints and then challenges the author to create a product from those constraints. Oulipian poetics are both emulative and emergent. Their constraints arise from mimicking other constraints, but they still manage to be original and meaningful. The texts of OuLiPo are built both by humans and by the systems that humans build. In the realm of visual art, ’60s Conceptualists like Sol LeWitt are helpful in identifying the underpinnings of “default” working procedures because of their twin interests in failure and systems. Many of these artists use strikingly similar working methods, harnessing non-intervention to generate solutions.
Non-intervention is also significant in contemporary film. Gus Van Sandt’s film Gerry and his recent Palme d’Or winning Elephant are based on site-specific improvisation and camerawork. His films are informed by those of Dogme 95 (which arose from the same countries as “The New Sobriety”), and Dogme 95, in turn, is informed by the French New Wave.
Rudy: In the hands of graphic designers, to what degree are these default systems a sort of critique of design?
Rob: In the end, the most potent critiques offered by designers using Default Systems seem to be linked to guilt and loss. Default Systems, and the formats that they include, comment not just on the mechanics of systems but on systemic thinking in general, and on the new life of man in the networked Global Village. The computer has changed design, but it has also changed our process of thinking and making. Formats and systems govern everything from our weaponry systems to our guidelines for citizenship.
Rudy: That’s not as much a critique as it is an affirmation of our current situation. Or is it?
Rob: That’s the question. In the face of eroding history, vanishing citizenship, bulging landfills and sprawling consumerism, what is the critique that Default Systems offer? Are they resistant, complicit, or both? Are their strategies effective or cliched? The answers to these questions will not come from the designers themselves, nor should they. They will come from the critics and from the critical language they derive. To render their forms and tactics available is to open them up for discussion. This discussion is a powerful first step. As design’s visual codes become more widely understood, they become more pliable to the designers who employ them. As the assumptions of systemic thinking become popularized, societies may choose more actively to absorb or combat them. Design will play a role in this selection process.
Rudy: How come so little has been written or said about the use of these Default Systems, which we both acknowledge are widespread?
Rob: Because Default Systems are deliberately invisible. To articulate them and the conditions that enable them is an important first step in the critical process. To evaluate their message is an important second step, and this has not been done. The lack of this evaluative mechanism betrays a snag in the fabric of design production with regard to its criticism. The language of criticism must employ its own forms and tactical instruments. Design is still in need of an external critical language, rigorously defined. The development of this language will almost certainly alter the climate and context in which designs are made both now and in the future. The problem is not that Default Systems are bad and haven’t been opposed. The problem is that not even designers really understand what they mean. And that problem—along with the irresponsibility that it suggests—is far worse.
This article first appeared in Emigre #65. © 2003 Rob Giampietro.
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Philosophy for Bloggers
http://crowdtalks.tumblr.com/post/40168206485/philosophy-for-bloggers
With our upcoming event focusing on trends, I thought it would be appropriate to delve a little deeper into one of the vehicles that facilitates trends…blogs.
The internet is home to a huge number of design blogs - each one an extensive digital scrapbook of visual culture. Although there is great overlap in the content posted, each blog is uniquely subjective in the type of work they promote. But the motivation behind posting is universal: the cultural gain of sharing content.
The French philosopher Bourdieu says that to be able to make an aesthetic judgment of taste you need to possess or earn capital to gain the authority to make a constructive judgment. He proposes there are three types of capital: 1]economic 2] symbolic and 3] cultural. Earning these capitals gives you a platform from which to make a valued judgment. When the capital is not there, the judgment made is superfluous and purely a subjective aesthetic judgment.
When looking at online visual culture, symbolic capital is highly sought after in the blogging world – with the constant goal of earning the authority of knowing what is worth looking at; what’s hot and what’s not. Tumblr and Twitter are key examples of this. On both you strive to attain followers (because if many people interact with your blog/website/twitter then you must be doing something right, right?).
On Tumblr the focus is on liking posts and re-blogging. Re-blogging original contented posted by a blog you follow creates a dynamic Chinese whisper of visual culture, allowing you to trace the post to the source. By earning thissymbolic capital, the blogger gains greater authority, and thus gains the interest of his audience, therefore increasing the chance of earning a re-blog – the power of association.
The other forms of capital are less relevant to the online world. Our online avatars don’t really care about money when consuming information unless a transaction is taking place so economic capital is not a factor. Bourdieu states that the acquisition of Cultural capital ‘necessarily presupposes the investment of time devoted to learning and/or training’. For example, in order to access and understand the information inside a philosophy text, you would need to have some sort of training in the specific field of philosophy. In my opinion, while an object of cultural capital may exist online, the gain of cultural capital is limited to the physical world, where you are dealing with education and first hand research – reading a published book, or undergoing a course on a subject.
So, what do trends have to do with symbolic capital? When something is posted on a blog, depending on the content and the audience, it can be quite abundant in symbolic capital. If another blogger sees this post, surrounded by ‘likes’ and comments, the post is likely to be reblogged, thus granting the second blog access to the symbolic capital. This chain of events leads to the same work being circulated very quickly to a large audience. Stemming from the popularity of the initial post, posts with similar content/themes are likely to be shared as well, strengthened by the visual association. Other artists and designers can then dissect the key features in the success of the work, and by reproducing them in their own work, seek to earn the lucrative symbolic capital.
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MD
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Trends In The Design Industry
http://crowdtalks.tumblr.com/post/45827566118/trends-in-the-design-industryThe dictionary definition of ‘trend’ is as follows: “a general direction in which something is developing or changing”. For the most part beginning an exploration of a term at the dictionary definition is an unimaginative start. However it’s inclusion here is relevant, if only to highlight the difference between how people perceive trends in design, and what they actually are.
There is no doubt that the world of design and design critique is filled with the term trend, but it has become a word that is most often used as a negative, to describe when something has become common and over-used, most often for the wrong purposes. This is often the case - design is first and foremost a form of visual communication, intending to impart a message to the observer, and in the modern world is incredibly fast-paced and pressured environment. The way that this message is conveyed varies enormously, with all factors from the actual elements of the design itself (colour, form, typography) to the media through which it is delivered affecting how the final outcome, how it is understood.
In this rapidly changing environment, the chance to, what is often seen by the client as ‘unnecessarily re-inventing the wheel’ is often shot past in favour of having the piece of work completed in a language that is understood already. This is partly to do with design often being perceived as a form of production, but also to do with an increasing understanding of design. Communication is all around us in many varied forms, everyone has experienced it - and as a result many times people commissioning design already have a clear mental image of what they believe the design should be.
Phrases like “can you make it cleaner?”, “it needs to look more (insert company name)-y” and “let’s make it more experimental” are all familiar to anyone who has worked as a designer in the world of media, where quick-fix applications of style are most common. However they indicate that there is a basic understanding of when things do and don’t “work”. This highlights a key issue in the debate on trends: it is not so important to understand when something is or is not successful, but more the why.
There are times when what began as a trend, in fact becomes a style, and in this way gains credibility. The word trend is often perceived as a ‘dirty word’ in design, and conjures up images of mass production and phrases like ‘jumping on the bandwagon’. The association here is that when something becomes trendy, and people begin to emulate it, they are achieving success through imitation rather than originality. However, when a trend becomes a style, it moves off the ‘do not touch’ shelf into the designer’s toolbox of acceptable references.
The difference between copying a style and using it is in understanding it’s ideological, not visual, basis. When the designer investigates the way in which a particular style has come about, and understands the motivations behind it, then he will see why that formula works in certain situations and not in others, and be in a position to employ it’s use in an effective manner rather than simply copying it. Often this is not the natural approach of a designer, as the industry is primarily visual and not conceptual, but it will serve to strengthen the basis of any piece of work. Additionally it allows for the evolution of a particular style into new uses, creating new variants as the functionality and the media of the design changes.
This issue of imitation is one that highlights the difficult position that design in the modern sense often finds itself. Broadly speaking, direct imitation is rarely an issue in the art world, where the natural approach is to try and understand the conceptual basis behind the work, the message it is conveying. This sort of imitation, or collaboration, often becomes a movement, with various people or groups working on a similar topic or in a similar way, exploring often in what is seen as a collaborative manner. Many visual styles have in fact been around for so long that it is hard to know where they initially began. The use of collage, for example, has been widely employed by a variety of artists from Kurt Schwitters and Henri Matisse through to David Hockney, and is popular amongst creatives of almost every image-making profession, both young and old.
In contrast, it is interesting to see that the conceptual drive behind perhaps the most well-known style of graphic design was to introduce a measured system, often purely mathematical and functional. Explorations that produced what has colloquially become known as a ‘Swiss style’ of design, or more academically as the International Typographic Style, were led by designers such as Karl Gerstner, who were keen to use grid-based layouts that were highly regulated and structured. Its origins however can be attributed to Jan Tschichold’s Neue Typographie, under Principles of the New Typography he states that “the speed with which the modern consumer of printing has to absorb it means that the form of printing also must adapt itself to the conditions of modern life” (Jan Tschichold, Die neue Typographie, 1928). This shows how a strong functional ideology would become the basis for one of the defining graphic design texts of the 20th century, and an ideology that rung true to many designers of the day.
The fact that designs from this era are still seen as contemporary today, indicates the importance of these early design principles, and is evident in their repercussions through to contemporary design. This is an era that every design student is aware of, and has spread into broader culture not only in the direct form of posters and prints, but in coveted transport signs, for example. The flip-side of the opening quote is just this, a mass movement and evolution of a particular design ideal shows how a ‘trend’ can be positively interpreted and evolved, moving the design world forward.
Design trends are not only about using the same colour, or the same typeface, but are also deeper indicators of what is popular from a consumer point of view. To take a clear example, although there are claims that its success are allied with a global recession, or nostalgia, the current success of ‘vintage’ goes far deeper than simply the visual appearance of old fruit crates and enamel kitchenware. It is an indicator of a need for a design language that reflects authenticity, and what can be more authentic than an object that has to be cheap and sturdy, or a road sign that is designed to be utterly functional? It is hardly surprising that this became popular in a world where we are constantly bombarded with visual media - as a result of which we have become increasingly more discerning in sorting out the authentic from the mock-authentic.
Investigating and experimenting with a trend is beneficial to the wider design community, as it creates a testing ground for the ideologies that are presented in the ideas. The more an idea is tested the stronger it becomes, and the more directions it can be pushed in. This evolution is often stunted by the bad reputation that the word trend carries, which is a shame as collaborations and working on top of other people’s ideas often produces the most interesting results.
It is important to understand why there are certain things that we already recognise as fulfilling their purpose - for example most of us can recognise a corporate annual report when we see one, but why is this? And more importantly why is it often discarded as boring? The fact that a trend or style is something that is recognisable and that we attribute certain characteristics to is not the terminal factor here, but more the simplicity and unchallenging aspect of the design - the same qualities that brought about the advent of the International Typographic Style.
The mass of visual references available on the internet means that the process of development in design is sped up considerably. It is not only a truly open and equal place, where anyone can upload anything they please, but it has also become a meritocracy in it’s own right, where trends appear and evolve in fast succession. Websites like ffffound.com and Pinterest are image-sharing sites where this process can be seen happening, as with the blogging site tumblr, where the ability to ‘re-blog’ posts means that an image can resurface on hundreds of different blogs overnight.
In the digital space that the world of media now finds itself, it is interesting to study what effect accessibility has had on users that have had no traditional design education. Rather than disregarding this, however, the results often have a freshness and naivety that is missing from more considered designs. Memes are a perfect example of this, as they are utterly user-generated, and rarely have any sort of ground-breaking design. However they serve their purpose perfectly, and are more successful in a ‘viral’ sense than any big-budgeted campaign trying to capture the attention of these very people. They are in a sense the mayfly of the design world, where changes and evolutions can be observed at a heightened pace.
Their success is in fact entirely reliant on repetition and adaptation, and being re-made by the very people who consume them. Sharing is one of the key elements that keeps the internet moving. People like to share, but the natural process of sharing means that people will only share things they genuinely like, creating the same organic process of selection mentioned earlier. This process is not dissimilar to the commercial world of design, where successful pieces of work become revered, referenced and mimicked for their success, often supported by the same platforms as earlier mentioned.
Instagram is also interesting in it’s success, as it is a service that has grown out of the same trend for vintage styling - the image filters that are now at the touch of a button, replicating old film processes that would produce oversaturated images by accident can now be predictably used to increase the authentic appeal of the user’s photos. In this way the images that chronicle and document people’s lives are not so cold, and have a more personal feel to them.
Is it the case that by the time something has become a trend, it is no longer a valuable asset to the designer? It depends on the temperament of the designer. Overall there is more to be learnt from studying and observing trends than there is by ignoring them altogether, but the aspiration of a designer should be to explore, not aim for ‘new’, with the end result of exploration and experimentation almost certainly being something different and innovative. The trap of desperately aiming to always create new work means the energy is misplaced and the results will be shallow - whereas exploring things with time and concentration is what is most likely to yield new and interesting results.
The attitude of the designer to the evolution of their own work by other people, be it using a particular style, typeface, arrangement or concept, is also an important factor in the advancement and evolution of the industry as a whole. It is unreasonable for anyone to claim that they own a particular design without disregarding the influence on them of all previous design that has come before it, just as an painter will appreciate that they are not solely responsible for all aspects of their painting, but have been influenced by other work around them. Ultimately, as the opening phrase also highlights, the world of design is bettered by these evolutions and collaborations. As the much-edited, changed and improved phrase goes (originally coined in 1708, eventually rewritten in 1820 by Charles Caleb Colton), ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’.
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Toby Jury Morgan
tobyjm.com
