Friday, April 17, 2015

I don’t really pay attention to design blogs, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing so. It doesn’t bother me that a lot of people have similar reference points and make similar conclusions from those references. It’s just something that happens. As with most things, context matters.

It’s obvious that following a trend to ones advantage is not always bad. Quite the opposite. Design is a reflection of the culture we live in. Through culture, we arrive at a common set of symbols, visuals, and signs that are specific to this time and place and understandable to particular audiences. There will be situations where a designer can and should take advantage of this phenomenon to speak to a particular audience or illicit a particular response. If anything, I’m more suspect of someone who bases all their formal decisions on rejecting a trend. It’s a reactionary fear of the cultural boogeyman. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Okay but still, there are times when designers follow trends in ways that piss people off right?

To that, I’d like to make the case that in those situations, it’s actually not about the trend at all. Focusing on whether or not one should follow a trend is just a smokescreen discussion that causes designers to ignore what’s actually unproductive about the work they do.

When designers drink too much of a particular visual Kool-Aid and get called out their peers for “blindly following trends” there are a few underlying reasons why of those peers might be pissed off.

1.) The designers reproduced something they’ve seen without critically engaging with the source material.

2.) The designers reproduced something they’ve seen without adding their own perspective, personal spin, or commentary.

3.) The designers reproduced something they’ve seen in a situation where it’s inappropriate.

4.) The designers reproduced something they’ve seen without a satisfying justification for doing so.



These reasons that I’ve outlined mostly deal with sincerity, rigor, criticality and intent. The act of trend-following is symptomatic of an absence of those qualities but it itself is not a root cause. To that, I ask, why not critique a designer on those terms rather than focus a surface-level manifestation?

Well, we’re in a field that emphasizes originality. We’re told over and over again that being original is a virtue and something that everyone should aspire to. But as with discussions in art, a work of design is framed within a historical context. What came before the work is always an implied subject. Keedy writes, “if someone designs an original typeface, for example, they don’t invent new letters; they invent new shapes for letters that we understand only because they are so similar to the shapes of letters that already exist. It is not so much the originality of the particular shapes that are important, but rather the ingenuity of the letter forms in the context of all other letter forms that existed before, and the meaning or significance they convey in that context. Uniqueness in and of itself is not very significant, nor is it as pervasive in design as we claim it is. Invention and imagination are very important to design but they don’t come out of thin air, they come from the context they were created in, not from some self-taught genius.”

So in the end, do what you want, communicate what you want to communicate—if it just so happens to line up with the zeitgeist, then fine. It’s totally okay to dabble in a popular design trend just as it is okay to dabble in a popular music genre. There are times to love pop music, and there are times to hate it. But no matter what you shouldn’t hate pop music only because it’s popular. You should hate it when it becomes lazy, appropriative, insincere, and/or superficial. Strive for sincerity, strive for rigor, strive for criticality. There’s no need to strive to avoid the conversations of the now if those qualities are in line.