#163 Boujee design
Beautiful cider bottles and lots of 🔥 links
Happy Monday!
A lot has changed since I last wrote to you. I said farewell to New York at the end of August and am living in London again, and I am also taking a Sabbatical from my job at Monzo until December. Now I’m back and (mostly) unpacked I’ll be using some of my newfound time and space to write to you a bit more consistently.
I’m also taking this moment to slightly switch up the format. Going forward I want to make each issue feel more like a window into what I’m thinking and reading about right now. So I’ve slightly renamed the first two sections and am giving greater prominence to the list of links and adding more of my own commentary. We’ll see how it goes! As always thanks for reading 🦞
Something to think about: The boujee-fication of everything?
I keep an eye on trend-spotter Oren John’s drops. Most recently he brought to my attention this almost absurdly tasteful toolkit from brand TINKR, which features your standard array of tools in a muted pastel palette. DIY has never looked so damn chic.
The luxury category has of course always existed, but the existence of social media does seem to have created the motive and the means for companies to spring up offering the photogenic, fancy, all-round -boujee-fied version of truly whatever product you’ve tapped into Google. I’ve been calling this trend the boujee-fication of everything, with no product category too humble to deserve a glowed up brand (and presumably a much healthier margin). Aside from a TINKR hammer, Who Gives a Crap toilet roll, Kinfill cleaning products and August tampons all also very much qualify here. Don’t worry, Pagerie will ensure you pet stays boujee too.
As a designer I should probably be capitalising hard on this trend, though I do fear that the design decisions in some of these products are little more than cosmetic. Slap on an instagram-friendly type choice and colour palette, whilst the essential functionality remains unchanged. Where are the companies with a genuinely new idea about how a hammer should work? Those are the products I’d personally be more excited to see.
(Side note, how do we spell this word? Boujee? Bouji? Bou-gee? The Internet does not agree).
Design takeaway: What’s the boujee version of your design?
🛠️ Alas the sage green toolkit is sold out on the TINKR website, but you can still get it in navy
Something nice: Clay cider bottles
I discovered the existence of these tall, salt-glazed stoneware bottles via the impecabbly tasteful instagram account @tour_de_source. They were thrown by hand on a potter’s wheel and then fired to carry cider pressed in Normandy, France in the 18th and 19th centuries. Once fired at 1200 degrees celsius, salt-glazed stoneware is dense, durable, and impervious to light, which protects the cider’s delicate flavor and fizz.
Stoneware production was a cottage industry two hundred years ago and so was a more practical bottling choice for local cider-makers compared to expensive glass. The imperfections from this handmade process gives each bottle a distinct character that makes them collector’s items nowadays. I think they almost look like a Morandi painting come to life. I vote for more everyday items with as much personality as one of these bottles.
Design takeaway: How could your design show traces of its making?
🍾 In Design Lobster #95 we looked at why different types of wine have bottles with different shapes
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What I’ve been reading
These products feel hallucinatory. They take the social-media mandate of self-modification to its logical extreme, embracing easy-breezy chemical additives and image augmentation: enhancing the self until it spills from its pores. The aesthetic is as much a defense mechanism against the internet era as it is a self-aware in-joke: We can see what late-hyper-digital-artificially-intelligent capitalism is doing to us—isn’t it a laugh?
I confess this piece by Kyle Chaka has been living rent-free in my head for at least a month now. It articulates something important about the present moment that I still don’t quite know how to fully digest as a practicing designer. In my own essay last year on Post-Taste I speculated that the growing popularity of ‘ugly design’ was a counter-reaction to the pixel-perfect sterility of mainstream culture and Chayka’s conclusion, whilst similar to my own in some respects, pushes out much further into what I can only really describe as nihilism. I might write more about this in the future.
In particular, the farther something is from the median training datum, the harder it is for AI to do. In my estimation, this could be along any axis – an uncommon visual effect, high-touch animations, a pixel-perfect UI, a new interaction paradigms, especially high data density, etc. AI design will be safe. If you ask it to be bold, it will be bold in a safe, reasonable, well-trod way.
I am always intrigued by opposing takes on anything and The Impact of AI on Design ™️ seems to create perfect conditions for diametrical opinions to bloom. Both writers, designer Eric Kennedy and recruiter Tom Scott admittedly do converge on the opinion that design craft is going to matter more and not less in the future we are careering towards. It does feel to me that we are still, two years after the launch of ChatGPT, simultaneously both awaiting an imminent transformation of the design profession and struggling to point at any really great design that an AI has had a serious role in creating.
This reflects a business culture obsessed with outcomes while treating outputs as speed bumps. But outputs (code, design, the products themselves) are the load-bearing work—the actual prerequisites for the outcomes desired. Focusing on outcomes while ignoring outputs means hiding in abstractions and absolving oneself of accountability.
Author of Shaping Things and all-round design legend Frank Chimero is on saltier form than usual in this piece which I am here for. It might sound slightly sacrilegious for some of my readers to value design outputs over outcomes, but I think it is high time for a vibe-shift here. We simply can’t measure everything that’s important about a design, so paying attention to the thing itself matters!
But more and more I’ve come to believe that quality isn’t a slogan, a program, or a scorecard. It’s a promise kept at the edge by the people doing the work. And, ideally, quality is fundamental to the product itself, where users can judge it without our permission. That’s the shift we need: away from heroics at the center, toward systems that make quality inevitable.
I appreciated this well-researched and patiently argued essay from designer Matt Ström-Awn. I don’t think there is a single day that goes by that I don’t use the word quality in a meeting somewhere so it’s a topic that gets my attention. The thesis of the piece—that centralising control of quality isn’t sustainable because it requires leadership heroics I broadly agree with, though I would love to have heard more about how the companies he cites— Lego, Toyota, Gore-Tex and so on—actually instill an employee culture that values quality, and how they hold the course when things go wrong with this model. In my experience these are big challenges.
Hope you have a boujee week,
Ben 🦞
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Bourgeoisie= bou-gie? That’s my take
anyway. Thanks as usual for the newsletter.
Loving the new format! (And it’s definitely boujee…)