undesign

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  • jawbreaker

    http://www.dmc.co.uk/index.php?b…

    "In her profile of Tibor Kalman, Design and Undesign, Liz Farrelly writes that he "presents complex ideas in the most transparent of visual languages". Since the dot-com bubble burst, the web too has begun to show greater transparency and - like hemlines rising during a recession - signs of a new aesthetic austerity. The web equivalent of the miniskirt is an increasing trend towards simplicity: fewer technical bells and whistles, and an emphasis on content, not design for design's sake."

  • mrming0

    Interesting article. I think we're all concentrating a lot more on function than we were three or four years ago but to try and say that there's an 'undesign' movement sounds like journalists looking for a pretext to write articles.
    b3ta.com is wildly popular because it's funny. The pieces are made quickly and without much care because they are communicating whimsical ideas. The author of this article seems to be confusing humour with 'design'.

    The popularity of blogging is surely down to the fact that they give worldwide publishing power to anyone who wants it, which has resulted in some interesting reading. As the majority of bloggers are not designers most blogs take a no-nonsense approach to design and layout.

    If anything this article shows that the web is coming of age in terms of content. Which is logical enough really.

    Now that the businesses have been scared off by the web's failure to generate huge amounts of cash overnight, the web is growing from the bottom up with content published by indivuduals and small collectives.

    Anyway I'm sure you already know all this, so I'm going to go and see if I can confuse my client into overlooking the fact that I've done no work by turning up with a page of 10pt verdana and calling it 'undesign'.

    :-)

  • Blofeldt0

    I think this is a poor article.

    By trying to create the illusion that ideas are detached from empirical style, the ideas are somehow supposed to become purer. 'Undesign' is a design style that aims to subvert design traditions but has to use the same language to achieve this aim. Because we are already literate in a traditional design language this subversion creates an immediate reaction of interest. We 'get it'. Undesign is part of the statement. The fact that the authors of b3ta make a conscious decision to use this style and already understand visual language education of the audience means that Undesign, has become Extra design.

    I don't see that this article has considered this.