Designing in a Post-Taste world
"Avant Basic" and other thoughts on ugliness
Happy Monday! Now here’s a potent dictionary definition to start your week:
UGLY - Offensive to the sight; contrary to beauty; being of disagreeable and loathsome aspect; unsightly; repulsive; deformed. Spenser. Like the toad, ugly and venomous. Shakespeare. O, I have passed a miserable night, So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams.
From Webster’s 1913 dictionary
As a designer, it’s always been a pretty foundational premise that I’m here to make things more beautiful. But the truth is that in recent years I’ve begun to feel less sure. Dangerous thoughts no doubt for someone in my profession, but between you and me I’ve been thinking ugly thoughts for a while now.
That is to say, literal thoughts about literal ugliness. About the difference between the ugly and the merely kitsch and at what point something is no longer ugly at all and is simply bad. Quite frankly, obscure thoughts that I was mostly content to keep to myself. But in the past week or so, I read Andrew Chen’s essay which (almost as an aside) described a brave new AI-powered world where ugly is the new beautiful and had a premonition of a future where every investor wants to know how you are going to make your app/building/packaging more ugly to ensure you stay relevant 😱
Shit, I thought. I’m going to have to get my thoughts about ugliness in order. If you too have wondered about Crocs, why the Ugly Design instagram is so addictive and what the hell is going on with Gen Z fashion then this one is for you. I can’t promise that no design rules were violated in the creation of this essay, so consider this your trigger warning and read on if you dare.
Peak taste
Let’s start by winding the clock back to the halcyon days of March 2016. I’m choosing this month (somewhat arbitrarily) because it was the month that WeWork achieved a milestone $16bn valuation prompting a frenzy of speculation about its high-design vision of the future workplace. It was also around this time that I remember an architect friend of saying to me that being in a WeWork felt like being in a period drama about now.
The pot plants, the muted pastel colours and anodyne serif-sloganed posters—so unimpeachably tasteful and globally transferrable. To be in one was to somehow come into precise contact with the zeitgeist of the 2010’s. Molly Fischer, in her splendid 2020 essay The Tyranny of Terrazzo describes the feeling better than I ever could:
Maybe it is a dream, this room you do and don’t know, assembled from cliché and half-recollected spare parts; a fever dream — or, no, that’s too much. This room functions more like a CBD seltzer, something you might buy in a salmon-pink can. There’s not a lot of distinctive taste, but still, it’s hard to resist when you’re on a permanent search for ways to feel better. The ambience is palliative — simple but not severe. Even the palette faintly suggests a medicine cabinet: powdery pharmaceutical pastels, orange pill bottles, Band-Aid pink.
—Molly Fischer, The Tyranny of Terrazzo—Will the Millennial Aesthetic ever end?
In the middle years of the last decade this sleek and oh-so-friendly new aesthetic was ascendant everywhere. Whether you call it the Millennial Aesthetic or the Instagram Aesthetic or even the International AirBnB Style you could find it on every surface of the world’s trendiest districts. From the (exposed) light fixtures of your favourite coffee shop to the clean lines and rounded serifs of the Casper advert in the billboard outside. Design-forward, glossy yet down-to-earth—for a while this was how the future looked.
Because of Brexit and the US Election, 2016 often gets described as the high watermark of truth in public discourse, with the years subsequent bracketed somewhat apocalyptically as the Post-Truth era. But what if this year was also a Peak Taste? A high watermark for a certain kind of minimal, straight-down-the-line, tasteful “Good Design™️”. With the ominous implication of course that we are now in a Post-Taste era, whatever that might mean.
Poor old Adam Neumann. In the years following 2016 WeWork’s valuation shot up to a stonking $47bn before a calamitous drop that lead directly to bankruptcy proceedings in November last year. Life comes at you fast, and entering a WeWork now (if it is even open) does not induce in us the same -geist power it once did. Us Millennials love our pot plants sure, but they have lost their revolutionary edge, and all that pink has felt like too much for while. Times have moved on, but to where exactly?
Things get boring
On the surface at least, since 2016 things have only got more tasteful. Indeed, tasteful to the point of sterile. Alex Murell’s fantastic March 2023 essay The Age of Average captured the creeping blandification of visual culture, from the homogenisation of car design to the determination with which the world’s major brands have tried to rinse their logos of any discernible personality in the name of “design”.
Though I have picked on WeWork in my essay, what Murrell makes abundantly clear in his is that the aesthetic phenomenon we’re talking about has extended far beyond their pastel-tinted walls. And that in fact the trend has been taken to even more corporate and homogeneous heights elsewhere.
In his essay, Murrell speculates that what we are seeing is perhaps function of globalisation, of risk-averse corporate decision-making or ‘the moodboard effect’ of designers all pulling from the same online sources.1 He ends with a call to arms for readers to be bolder and more original in their references and their work:
It’s time to cast aside conformity. It’s time to exorcise the expected. It’s time to decline the indistinguishable. For years the world has been moving in the same stylistic direction. And it’s time we reintroduced some originality.
—Alex Murrell, The Age of Average
Noble sentiments and ones that I would defend to the death, but as I read the essay I already had a nagging feeling that they felt out of date. That there was already some pretty weird stuff going on, if only you were looking in the right places.
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Things start to get weird
I think the exact moment when I began to suspect that something had gone a bit off in the design fridge was when I saw the the 2022 album cover of UK band Wet Leg. Woof, I thought—that is a murky logo choice. The oozy typeface, the way it hung haphazardly from the top-right like it was melting in the sun. I found it brash and opinionated and yes, ugly. And I also felt caught out, because soon enough I began to see glimmers of this freaky new energy elsewhere too. My friends began wearing Crocs and fleeces. Posts from the Ugly Design instagram account were suddenly popping up in WhatsApp threads every week. These happened.
In one of several rabbit holes of attempted understanding I chanced upon a TikTok trend—christened by Emma Hope-Allwood as Avant Basic—which at last seemed to pull these weird threads together. Encompassing artfully clashy knitwear, Word-art nostalgia and a whole heap of Memphis-inspired chonky homeware it was maximal and “Bad Taste™️” in a way that seemed to draw a solid (and slightly pixellated) line under WeWork, AirBnB and everything they represented.
Like air escaping from a burst tire, I could practically feel culture rushing into this weird and slightly unacceptable-feeling new space. In a world saturated in pot plants, sans serif fonts and tasteful pastel colours, all this ugly stuff felt disarmingly authentic. The lack of polish, the silliness, the genuinely unrelatable weirdness of some of the objects on display.
Recently I was talking to a strategist at a marketing agency here in New York about my observations and she said: Of Course. Gen Z grew up with templates and filters and Apple and Squarespace. Everything designed to perfection, designed indeed, to an inch of its life. These kids knew what good design looked like and didn’t care for it, because all that polish obscured the brand or the person behind it. What they wanted, she said, was something real.
In a world where everything is perfect and beautiful, the right way to counter-signal might be to be ugly, authentic, and real. Generative AI will every ad creative and video and image perfect. The people in the marketing will be beautiful (because they won’t be real) and the environments their in will be generated. They’ll say all the right things, because they’ve iterated on billions of variations. In a world that’s saturated with that, what will people respond to?
—Andrew Chen, How AI will reinvent marketing
So to come full circle, this just might be what Andrew Chen is talking about. And if his quote is right then AI is going to take it to an even more extreme levels in the coming years. Whether we like it or not, if us designers actually want to communicate with people visually (which is to say at all) we are going to have to learn the rules of ugly.
An Unscientific Ugliness Scale
As far as I can work out (and perhaps for good reason) there is no universally agreed upon scale for assessing how ugly a product is. So in the absence of one, I humbly submit my own below as a conversation-starter. Ranging from the merely fruity to the genuinely nasty, things ramp up considerably as you travel from left to right.
I created this scale to grade pieces and get a sense of what we’re really talking about when we talk about ugly design. Because I think the reality is that most ugly design isn’t really that ugly at all. It’s kind of just messing about.
We start on the left with the merely fruity. Here we find that famous Wet Leg logo alongside the funkier end of recent branding efforts—I’ve shown Strange Water as an exemplar. Ugly here means a wonky font or an outré composition, with the rest of the product recognisably following the rules of good taste. This is the part of the pool I predict is going to get pretty crowded over the next few years.
Next up is a category I call gawky. I’ve noticed AI hardware dabbling in this space, from the chunky orange spinner of the Rabbit R1 to the hunchback of Humane’s Pin. A good way to stand out from Apple I guess. I’d place the Yeezy footwear edging into this space plus goopy ceramics like those made by vibey ceramicist Mud Witch.
Another step over on the scale and we land firmly in the realm of the kitsch. This is where it starts to get silly, Crocs many baffling collabs like the above Shrek example epitomising the genre. Ugly Design starts to do a good trade in this area with all manner of animal and plant-shaped clothing and homeware.
Collectively these first three categories in my mind are faux- rather than true ugly. They dabble but remain fundamentally adjacent to actual ugliness. It’s ugliness in inverted commas, a nod and a wink without getting your hands dirty.
Disagreeable, the fourth step is the where I would say the first truly ugly things appear. We’re talking hairy or furry stuff, design that straddles uncanny valley of biological references. Things get siliconey and confusing.
Nasty, the final stop on my scale is probably worth avoiding. This is design that actively provokes a disgust reaction of some kind. Whether through references to disease, sex or bodily processes when you see this kind of design, you feel bad, normally immediately. It would be a brave brand to try and play in this space.
One final thought for you. I think ‘badness’ is a fundamentally different dimension to ugliness. Thus you can have fruity but bad design and also kitschy but good. In theory there are designs out there that can be nasty but also good, but I think it will get harder the deeper you go into the scale, as the disgust reflex gets progressively more in the way of any potentially positive feelings. I’m ready to be proved wrong though!
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Surviving and thriving in a Post-Taste world
Ugliness, as Dumbledore would probably never say, is a powerful magic, and I predict some train wrecks ahead as designers experiment with the new and unfamiliar powers that it affords. With that in mind, and to help you (and me) avoid disaster I’ve got four final thoughts on how to successfully dabble in this new design vocabulary (and get Andrew Chen off my back) without coming a cropper.
Don’t overcorrect
We all want to come across as authentic but as well all know, less is often more. In the this case a little fruity might be enough. As we’ve seen the truth of a lot of “ugly design” is that it’s often not actually ugly, it just manages to reference the ugly just enough to feel fresh. Try this first before sampling anything stronger.
Don’t try too hard
The whole damn point of this kind of design is to break down barriers between you or your brand and the people you are trying to reach. So being too clever and creating a new kind of distance all over again defeats the whole purpose. Ugly design is breezy and casual or it is nothing.
Make sure people are really laughing
The reason ugliness works (sometimes) is that it lightens things up. “Good Design™️” can feel a little po-faced, a little serious, and playing with the rules can relax matters and set people at ease. The trouble with comedy though is that it needs to be funny and not everyone finds the same things funny. So get to know your audience before taking any risks.
Ugliness should only ever be skin deep
There is no world in which anyone is pining for design that doesn’t work. A Post-Taste world is not a Post-Usability world. If your product depends on people being able to successfully understand how it works and use it regularly then do not be tempted to throw that out the window to chase some beautiful (ugly) dream. Mills Baker made this point better than I could last week:
Indeed playing fast and loose with aesthetics to my mind makes rock-solid usability all the more essential as there’s no aesthetic-usability effect to smooth things off. This time, you’re on your own!
I hope you enjoyed this mildly unhinged special edition, it was fun to write! Go boldly into the Post-Taste era (and go easy on the ugly stuff) this week.
Ben
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I might rather saltily add that perhaps they’re all just working out of the same WeWork 👅
A great analysis. History repeats itself, so what do we predict for the next cycle? Hard to say now that we have AI in the mix. I do have this feeling we're moving toward a renaissance of brand and identity that will hopefully get us out of this Helvetica x Balenciaga nightmare we're living. I think people are sick of everything feeling boring and flat, but the average person doesn't really want to live with a trash bag sofa (unless you're harry nuriev). Bring back the fancy fonts and the flourishes! I hope I'm right.
Oh yes indeed! Please unhinge some more.