merdesigner

A name simplifies and packages culture into something that can be passed around. But coherence comes through compression: contradictions, regional differences, competing ideologies, individual authorship, and contextual specificity gradually get sanded away in favour of something cleaner and easier to recognise.

Online, images rarely appear in isolation. They appear in feeds, on moodboards, and as algorithmically grouped clusters, all of which train viewers to read visual resemblance as evidence of broader affiliation.

As pessoas não podem se contradizer, só as palavras podem

For a brief moment, we thought it would be post-modernism and print forever. We’d finally smash the grid. We’d all be poetic art-designers making free-wheeling typography that defied clear meaning, slipping through the subconscious like an eel. We were going to make graphic design like David Lynch made films.

Good ideas don’t happen frequently enough to satisfy the pace of the algorithm

Licensing is an agreement, and an agreement inherently enters you into a relationship.

They are, in essence, mirrors that reflect collective human creative output back to users – rearranged and recombined, but fundamentally derivative.

The danger is not that AI will fail us, but that people will accept the mediocrity of its outputs as the norm.

working with fewer options can actually sharpen a designer’s skills – it challenges you to be more intentional and resourceful

We often get caught up navigating endless possibilities instead of committing to a unique direction.

Without foolishness and fun there can be no imagination

Terms like 'authenticity' and 'sustainability' become empty verbiage when the hidden agenda is still, as usual, economic returns

an industry full of people who care deeply, but feel let down

Typographic space works not only on the scientific and philosophic imagination, but also on the literary imagination

People love to complain about branding, but what they’re really reacting to is its inescapability. It’s not that they dislike contemporary design; it’s that they don’t trust it. The more omnipresent branding becomes to our collective hive mind, the harder it is for it to signify anything beyond itself.

many brands exist as little more than a marketing layer over outsourced products