Graphic design memes, a little bit of designer humour
As a designer I am often looking at stock photos for design jobs, and have a subscription to a large photo resource. So I like to mess around with them sometimes.
The design memes side project
I have started creating design memes as a creative side project. There is lots of material as a graphic designer to gently make fun of our sometimes shallow and overly serious industry. Doesn’t stop me being passionate about the industry and designing.
The Less is more design memes
‘Less is more’ has it’s own Wikipedia page. My congratulations to the phrase*. Although it re-directs to a specialised page on minimalism, which in turn leads to Mies van der Rohe, one of the pioneers of modernist architecture, being responsible for the phrase.
So within graphic design it would be ‘Less clutter is better’. A tendency to over complicate, add too much, over explain, doesn’t lend to good visual communication. The human eye likes simplicity. A perfect example being the ‘I love New York’ design by Milton Glaser.
Mies Van der Rohe was the last director of the seminal design school The Bauhaus. I studied at an art college that was based on the Bauhaus, Grays School of Art in Aberdeen. A beautiful modernist building in the Deeside countryside.
I went to visit the Bauhaus (now a museum) on a visit to Berlin a couple of years ago. I was surprised to not enjoy the experience, despite loving Berlin, design, museums and art galleries. The visit reminded me design doesn’t belong in a gallery. The functionality that is the basis of design, plus us having design objects around us all the time, renders it pointless in a museum environment, in my opinion.
Or it could be it brought back bad memories of my time as an art student. Of corduroy clad design tutors in Le Corbusier spectacles, singularly not fit for purpose in terms of actually teaching, or I suspect making it in the design world.
More design memes will follow in future blog posts.
*During David Letterman’s early career as a weatherman he congratulated a tropical storm for being upgraded to a hurricane.
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