Cosmo's Tumbleweed Magnet

Gay Marriage

So all this stuff about gay marriage - some religious leaders seem to be trying to appear reasonable by steering clear of the "because those dirty gays are an abomination" argument (which for some odd reason people seem to react to rather badly) and going for "Marriage is for the procreation of children, between a man and a woman - ergo, gay people can't get married. Sorry guys!".

But here's a little thing - what about childless straight married couples? Does this mean that the church views their marriage as pointless/invalid/wrong? What about couples that CAN'T have kids? Is that then not a 'proper' marriage? Should the church split them up because they can't fulfil their procreational commitments?

Of course not; and I'll tell you why - because what marriage is really about is love and two people who want to make a symbolic commitment to each other, whether it's a man and woman, two men or two women. LOVE. Remember what Jesus had to say about that? Generally that it's a good thing, as I remember.

Get Angry

Last night I went to an event called "I Love Design", so it may seem a little incongruous that it would inspire me to write a piece titled "Get Angry"; but bear with me. The idea of the event was for designers around Bristol to talk for 5 minutes about what inspires them. There was much cosy talk about packaging from Pret with quirky copy on it, funny photographs where houses looked like they had a face, and nostalgia for a youth spent making fanzines. But bar one or two instances what I didn't see much was this : genuine passion. By that, I don't mean the thing you tell people when you want a job. I mean actually caring. And for me, caring means that when you see things badly designed, or much worse lazily designed, it makes you angry. Angry isn't always a bad thing. Angry can make you want to change things for the better. And if you can't come up with something you can speak about with passion convincingly at an event called "I Love Design", then chances are you don't care that much.

You see, normally it goes like this :

You go to art college to get all riled up about things. "I hate the way things are! I want to change the world!" you say. Then you manage to snag a job as a junior. You start to see the frustrations of life as a commercial designer, but you still want to create great work. You make your way up to senior, and producers / project managers use phrases like "JFDI" when things get rough, and you're starting to lose the will to tell them to fuck off. You work your way up to Creative Director, but you find you're so busy firefighting the day to day that you just don't really care that much any more. It doesn't really matter if the alignments are out on that Mueller Yogurt website - you pitched low price so this is all the client gets. The photos in that internal comms piece are terrible stock, but we'll live with it because the client didn't want to stump up for commissioned work (despite the fact that the doc is 80% images). Those vibrant DIY 'zines you made as a student are a source of glowing nostalgia, but bear no relation to the sludge of mediocre work you do now. And you know it.

But weirdly, in the last few years I've found myself travelling in the other direction. I was a pretty sloppy student; I didn't really care about much except prancing around in big tents to loud repetitive beats and finding girls with self-esteem low enough that sleeping with me seemed like a pretty good idea. But recently, I've become a bit angry. If you've followed me on twitter you know the drill. I can seem a little negative about things at times. While some people might think this is a bad thing, the truth is that for me this is a positive force.

"Dissatisfaction is the Engine of Creativity"

This isn't a quote from someone famous, I made it up on my way into work this morning. Or maybe I didn't; I expect someone already said it in the past using better words in a better order. (Maybe this guy?) But you get the gist. Getting back to last night's event, what I wanted to get on the mic and explain was that the thing the inspires me is this : dissatisfaction. That layout spread is dull. That illustration is nice, but could use a bit of simplifying. The terrible kerning on that typographic poster should have resulted in someone losing their job, or at the very least as a graphic designer; some sleep. That enigmatic geometric shape over someone else's landscape photo masquerading as an EP cover is lazy and should go in the bin.

In case you think I'm getting a little sanctimonious here, it may help for you to know that every time I look in my own portfolio I don't think "Hey, my work is great!". I look at the things I could have done better. I obsess over the small details. I wish that I'd had the guts to sell something more adventurous in to the client. I wish that I'd turned down that job I knew would end up like Microsoft packaging - all smiling stock people with headsets on and dull type. But that's what fires me; wanting to be better all the time. In the way I do my work, but also in the way I approach the work I want to do.

Many people in our industry talk about passion for the work they do. But that passion needs to go further than really really enjoying your book of Penguin book covers or knowing who Erik Spiekermann is. It needs to be followed up with the will to do something interesting, something different, something good - and when you do, making sure that by the time it's finished that it's right. By all means compromise at the conceptual stage where ideas are fluid and cooperation can take you in different directions. But then it comes to execution, there's no room for compromise. If the text in that button is 2 pixels too high - get it changed. If the client is asking for a change that will significantly compromise your (and at this point it is YOUR) design and turn you into a Photoshop puppet - push back.

In short : Being a great designer is half craft and creativity, half having enough force of will to get other people to buy into the idea that you know what you're doing. And to do this, sometimes it helps to get angry. Not just about the way you do your work, but also the way you approach the type work you want to do.

Thoughts on Instagram

Instagram photo effects (and the multitude of other phone grading apps). What's not to like? You can take any photo and add a nice effect that makes it look like it was taken in another time, on another, far more imperfect camera. The effects can be rather pretty; adding a patina of age, style, mood and nostalgia. So why don't I like it? Because it's a cheap approximation of an interesting thing.

You see, I love these :

http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/09/colour-photographs-of-new-york-1950s-by-saul-leiter/

because they're a product of their time. The colour reproduction, grain, texture and imperfections were dictated by the technology of the era. They're timestamped by the mechanism which created them - what I would call the mechanical aesthetic.

At the time these were taken the subject and composition of the pictures was the focus (no pun intended). With time, this has layered with the time-capsule of the mechanical aesthetic to make them even more interesting. Not just because they're pretty, but because they belong to a different time. They have an integrity, and that's interesting.

Compare that with a photo treated with an Instagram effect. It's a modern photo with a thin veneer of colour grading, digital noise, artificial case-leakage streaks, and vignetting. On the surface, it does make a dull picture a little prettier. But the effect is static, it has no randomness, no element of chance. More to the point, it's pretending to be something it's not - it doesn't have that integrity. Most of all, the ease with which you can produce the effect means that it's ubiquitous. It goes from being something which can evoke a certain dreamy nostalgic mood to "Oh, that again." By association the effect is cheapened, and eventually lost - wherever you see it.

You could say that the root of all this is a dissatisfaction with perfection. Most digital compact cameras can produce a pretty much perfect rendition of what you see in front of you. Perfection can be good, but can also get rather boring. My analogy for this would be the transition from prog rock to punk. Boredom with musicianship and technical slickness gives way to roughness, texture, imperfection. Successive later bands try to emulate the early punk bands, but often fail because they emulate the superficial characteristics of the sound and aren't rooted in the particular set of circumstances of that era. It becomes a facsimile, without the integrity. (Yes, I'm suggesting early punk had integrity. How they'd hate that.)

What's the big deal? It's just a bit of fun! True, but here's where I reveal my motivations. I was brought up in the 70's and 80's. A lot of my early memories are tied up in photographs of just the type I've been talking about. Yellowed polaroids, dreamy focus caused by cheap plastic lenses, all that stuff. It means a lot to me, because those photos bring it all back - not just the subjects, but the physicality of the pictures themselves, their mechanical aesthetic. Nostalgia is a fragile thing, and seeing pictures manufactured to look like this all the time has an impact on that, even though they're a shorthand version of the real thing. The line between that time and contemporary artifice is blurred. To use a musical analogy again - you hear a record from your childhood you haven't heard in years, it triggers all kinds of memories and feelings. But hear that record every day, and it soon loses its potency.

Now I'm not suggesting we ban Instagram, or go around with "Down with Instagram, Nostalgia Killers!" placards. It IS just a bit of fun. In the end, prompted by my personal feelings about Instagram, my point is more of a general one; reminding people that trying to recreate the past in the present day is sometimes a good way to cheapen our memories of it. And that's why I don't like Instagram.

Quick update :

I thought it might be fun to point out what I consider one of today's interesting and possibly defining mechanical aesthetics. I wonder if in 30 years time people will look at this and go all misty-eyed; maybe even write a program to make their immaculate holograms full of square compression artifacts and resizing blur?