It all looks the same...
Out of context: Reply #12
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- SkyPoo0
You know what I wish? I wish I still had all my old Creative Reviews from the 80's. I think you'd really see how homogenised and shallow design is now by comparing, say, next nonth's issue with its counterpart from 1988. There was such a vast array of work before the computers and the internet arrived. There was no way of knowing what anyone else was doing unless it appeared in books or in Creative Review. So everybody largely did their own thing in their own style, and homogenisation was slowed hugely by the fact that nothing visual could travel that fast back then.
There were still strains, and you could see that some people were following a strain, but their individuality would be so prominent that the strain would be an underpinning only.
Plagiarism was explosive back then too. If someone did soemthing that looked like something that had been published previously, A total shit storm would erupt, for a very long time, and people would be inflamed by it. Creative Review used to run ongoing wars of words between disgruntled people and it would run for issue after issue until CR finally gave both parties an article each to to defend or accuse.
Now, plagiarism IS the style. Everybody copies everybody else in an instant and because everybody's doing more or les the same thing it doesn't matter any more. Most of the people working in design now would not be able to judge good design vs bad design, they're programmed by repeat exposure to the dogmatic rules of what is seen as acceptable design now, and that is largely drivn by peer admiration. I'm sure all the agencies out there doing the current style can all be traced back to one studio somewhere that started it off. It has to be black and white, it has to feel like great abstract photographic depth, it has to have too-tightly tracked bold modrnist typography, crisp and white, range left, chunky grid structure, whatever.... Whatever.
Asking people to judge design today is like asking battery hens to appreciate haute cuisine.
The fact of the matter is we don't need this many people doing it now. Some of you should stop. Go and do something else now. If you're not driven to contradict the generic style in favour of rediscovering your own inherent individual style, then put your wacom pen down and leave.