A User-Generated Shift in Design
Fire up any social media app, and you’re guaranteed to be inundated with tiles of beautifully plated food, pristine blue-green waters in the tropics, and a desk so meticulously organized you almost forget this particular friend’s commitment to creating a new form of sentient life in their sink just two days ago.
Despite people clamoring that social media created this apparent phenomena of self-editing, it’s quite far from true. Humans have always altered the “self” they present to the world – it comes with the territory of being a social creature. We spend our formative years learning to navigate a social environment that is dependent upon us reading social cues that shift the “self” we present. But I’m not here to discuss the psychology of sharing, or even blame social media for all societal ills. I am, however, here to wildly speculate on what this shift means to visual design.
Visual design functions through an lexicon of images, colors, patterns, and icons, often dependent upon culture to aid in the context. This language is just like– well– a language. It only works if the other person has the toolset to decode it. This often means that, as a whole, visual literacy ebbs and flows according to what the majority is doing.
We see this happening dramatically in the design world with what Paul Adams of Intercom dubbed “The Dribbblisation of Design”[1] Adams argues that design often becomes homogenous through a focus on the resultant visual rather than the meaning or context. It’s the equivalent of building a transatlantic bridge but only making it large enough to hold pedestrians or bikes.
A good example of this widespread shift in design literacy is typefaces. Back even before the the good ol’ Gutenberg days, the human brain understood one thing very well: blackletter, or Gothic Script. It was the standard, the norm, the modus operandi of writing.
Today, the jumble of vertical lines, squished closely together even with all the flourishes, appears illustrative rather than functional. Yet, at the time, this was no more difficult to read in its time than serifs were in the 15th century, or sans-serifs are now.
The brain remains unsurprisingly adept at translating what the eye constantly sees–and our eyes see so much more thanks to the internet.
Now, a small, flat rectangular screen that we hold in our hands (when we’re not dropping it in the toilet) contains our entire world. One selfie post takes half an hour of shooting and editing, that clever comment went through four revisions. We have become curators and editors, tailoring the reality we present not just to strangers, but the people we know. We are becoming more deliberate–and this has resulted in the commodification of the individual. Merriam-Webster defines a commodity as, “something useful or valued,”[2] usually with the intent of sale.
Yeah – that follower count you’re trying to ramp up? You’re quite literally turning yourself into a product by assigning a measurable value.
So, the argument should follow that we aren’t spectacularly unique products. After all, we’re curating a perfection based on the other bytes we’ve seen–copying a convention because we have a stronger gauge of its impact. So is design doomed? Is user-generated content creating an blurry average of visuals whose focus on being quickly digested that is skewing the output of the “professional” design industry?
No. Everything ever in and out of this world has been reactive and cyclical. A focus on industrialization resulted in the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century, which then resulted in a shift back towards mechanized production, which then – you get the gist. What’s newer is that the reactive push-and-pull of design is significantly faster.
We’ve already seen a strong response to the focus on “beauty.” A resurgence in brutalism is apparent throughout the web, 80s geometry and type has been cleaned slightly but left intact, and 90s colors and gradients are back and so neon you can hear the crackle and hum of the CRT tv.
Ugly isn’t the only way to go – another response is to stop focusing on the old “form follows function” adage by designing “pretty for pretty’s sake”. Clean, serious, and very Western minimal design has seen a shift towards ornate, decorative, and playful visuals – largely through the influence of the sole user.
With an increasing power to define and influence the visual lexicon that shapes the visual world of humans, we are also seeing growing spheres of influence from more and more cultures and regions. Borrowing visual components from other cultures is hardly new, but the manner it’s being carried out in is quite distinct. Individuals from their respective regions and cultures are responsible for these insights, rather than an outsider that visits and “brings” back selected components. This increases the context and meaning of the elements, ideally resulting in a truer understanding and avoidance of appropriation.
As most designers will tell you, following a trend may pay off in the short run, but ultimately its value decays. With a slew of images all shiny and tailored, perhaps we should be curating for authenticity rather than status. Perhaps we will become more conscious consumers and designers because of our increased exposure to new design. Perhaps users the world over will change the metric by which we view the world. Perhaps we’ll just continue shoving the stuff on our desk out of frame to show off that clean, organized workspace.
[1] Paul Adams. Inside Intercom, 2016. blog.intercom.com/the-dribbblisation-of-design
[2] Merriam Webster. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commodity