My thoughts on design and other commercial arts (primarily photography) these days can be summed up with: It’s good, and I get it, but it doesn’t speak to me. A lot of ‘cool’ design freaks me out. I feel like lately as well a lot of ‘cool’ design has felt really inaccessible, very “oh I referenced this and this and this” and you just have to be up on your referential work game. But then so much of ‘cool’ design ends up referencing itself, and then the stuff that does have all that original referential basis still just looks so...”come on really?” I by no means am such an original designer, I of course end up for certain projects following trends, or trying to avoid them like the plague. But sometimes (most times) trendy ‘cool’ work just lacks certain aspects that make it interesting. It obviously ubiquity and it starting to feel like work created as simulacra (perhaps that’s putting a bit of hyperbole on it, or maybe I’m using simulacra wrong since I’m off my post modernist academia game)
