A Human Observer's Field Notes

Perhaps you don’t see this if you’re not on X or in any designer spaces but I am really not enjoying the slop-ification of 70s/80s industrial markings and institutional design. You know, the cargo cult trend people are making out of 70s-80s institutional design and out of micrographics. Except that this stuff looks that way FOR A REASON!!! And if you lived away from your computer screen and phone, you'd KNOW that.

It is really showing me that graphic designers who actually work in the "real world" (environmental graphic design, wayfinding, safety, signage, institutional, the large scale and infrastructural print world) live in a completely different world from the one occupied by most people calling themselves graphic designers on Dribbble and Behance.

The current trends are the “add a gear to it and make it steampunk” school of thought and trying to cargo cult functional design.

I feel like actual industrial graphic designers (man that’s a whole rabbit hole) and social media designfluencers live in two different worlds here, and the latter thinks the former is just aesthetic.

It's made me realize that what I actually want to do is design in the Real World and something broke in my brain where I really don't care about "aesthetic" anymore.

You just copied something without understanding the underlying logic of it, to follow the trend, to get that sweet sweet algorithmic attention, and now you're complaining that people are AI'ing a look that wasn't original to begin with.

(I say this as someone who LOVES industrial graphics and Institutional Futurism and is working hard to semi-codify the aesthetic. But most of the designers on X just copy the aesthetic and basically don't have any underlying logic as to why anything looks as it does.)

Getting really annoyed with the self-righteousness of what amount to basically Pinterest trend followers and fan artists.