"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?"
"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."
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| "From a series of posters for the Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks by Bureau 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 evening dress" |
"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."
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| "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" |
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| Is the pretty ugly just egocentric experimentation? "If I do it, it's meant to look bad, if you do it, it's just bad" |
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| "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" |
"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."
The Werkplaats Typografie (WT), a part of the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, is a two-year graphic design masters programme founded in 1998 by Karel Martens and Wigger Bierma.
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| Werkplaats Typografie is a prime example of this focus on contemporary concept driven design. The functionality of the website itself is a reflection of this, each image can be dragged to wherever a user decides, creating an interactive pin board. |
"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.":
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| Way finding for Deursen's Stedelijk Museum identity. "Compared to the buffed and primped identities of most major organisations, the Stedelijk identity feels refreshingly authentic and honest." |
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| The London 2012 Logo by Wolf Ollins has been noted for it's raw aesthetic, could this be evidence of the commercialisation of the pretty ugly. |
"In the US and UK many young designers have turned toward a retro craft aesthetic and a celebration of archaic print techniques... In comparison, the mostly Northern European approach of The Pretty Ugly feels much more daring and provocative."
"...think of the US gig poster scene, much of the work exhibited at Pick Me Up or the Hipster aesthetic satirised so acutely on this recent Tumblr.":
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| 'Hipster' re branding. |
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| 'Hipster' re branding. |
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| 'Hipster' re branding. |
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| 'Hipster' re branding. |
"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."
"the watered-down Modernism-as-style" - The general acceptance that Modernism like design is 'good design' is, I believe, a problem in the development of the field as well as restrictive to true communication.
"If the 'function' here is to kick over the traces and make us re-examine what 'good design' is then maybe it's working." - In relation to the key Louis Sullivan's Modernist principle of form following function.
"If we saw it on the side of a builder's van would it transform from Pretty Ugly to just plain ugly?"
Cult Of The Ugly, Steven Heller 2004
‘Ask a toad what is beauty… He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.’ (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1794)
"Then ask the same question to the Cranbrook Academy of Art students... and judge by the evidence they might answer that beauty is chaos born of found letters layered on top of random patterns and shapes. Those who value functional simplicity would argue that the Cranbrook student’s publication, like a toad’s warts, is ugly. The difference is that unlike the toad, the Cranbrook students have deliberately given themselves the warts."
"Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graphic design programme has been accused of hermeticism, formalism, theoretical obfuscation and other crimes against the values of both classic Modernism and the slicker professional mainstream." - http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-academy-of-deconstructed-design
Examples of work from Cranbrook Academy Of Art
Katherine McCoy, tutor at Cranbrook from 1971 - 1995
Edward Fella
Jefferey Keedy
Allen Hori
"In summarising the last twenty years at Cranbrook, the McCoys strike a self-consciously avant-gardist stance, describing a series of shifts, which began with the move from International Style Modernism to what Katherine McCoy has called ‘Mannerist Modernism’, and led to a fascination with ‘post structuralist’ theory in the 1980s.
‘Post-structuralism’ is an umbrella term commonly used to name a broad current in critical writing – primarily French in origin – which swept literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s and spread into art and architecture. Structuralism was founded at the turn of the century by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who argued that a verbal sign has no inherent significance, but has meaning only in relation to the system or ‘structure’ of language: a sign has no positive, essential significance, but is only a difference defined in relation to other signs."
Design, Writing, Research: Writing on Graphic Design by Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller 1996.
'Derrida described deconstruction as a mode of questioning through and about the technologies, formal devices, social institutions and central metaphors of representation... it describes a strategy of critical form making which is performed across a range of artifacts and practices.'
Examples of design adhering to the concept of deconstruction through form:
Looking at contemporary graphic design publications:
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