(hypo) critic

One of my favorite hobbies is hating on design. I'm a designer, and I love design, but any human being who spends so much of their lives making, looking at, talking about and agonizing over what's basically an abstract byproduct of our primitively evolved brains, can get a little self-hating.

There aren't really a lot of places to do this online besides Brand New. Total props to Armin of course, for his vision of a global design community, but its asinine comments and windbaggery can fill me with hate like not many other sites can, and I'm including things like youtube comments in my mind. I can ignore stupid shit: racists, other citizens of the seedier side of the internet, dumb videos and bad ads and made up "news" articles. But I guess I take design kind of personally.

I argued with other industry friends today about this corporate redesign of some place I've never heard of that sounds about as windbaggy as its design. Most of my friends liked it. I like the type I guess. As design goes, it's fine. There's certainly worse out there, but worse doesn't bother me as much as something that's "technically" appropriate and "well-done" but just feels heartless and empty and just shy of powerful in any way. I hate the idea. At least they didn't use Gotham. (Although they did use my other least favorite bullshit device in the world, QR codes.) It feels like a giant example of the sameness, the easy way out, and the risk-averse in our industry. Nobody wants anything new anymore, because new things are too scary and risky and not quantifiably profitable. And the last thing I want as a designer is to be expected to do something over, and over, and over again like a facsimile where you can't tell what the original was anymore.

But maybe I'm conflating something personal with the professional. Lately I've come to realize that most of what I expected to get out of work in the past ten years, I can't, or else it happens so rarely as to be hardly worth the pain. I'm really on the fence about if I can be totally justified in being disappointed by something as benign as this, or if I should seek some kind of religion.