trying to understand the convenient

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It is impossible not to realize day by day contemporary design outputs look more alike. This considerable amount of sameness urges me to think on the sufficiency of questioning behind these same, trendy design outputs. Creating a more refined visual language is one concern but it is important to remember that simplifying things to be more memorable, not to be narrow it down. 

Christoph Niemann

The usage of approved methods serves the need to be in pursuit of creating something convenient. It is where the term prototypicality emerged, which means categorization with reference to interaction. From books to websites, every product has a background in users’ minds related to their experiences and the users tend to repeat these interactions in every repetition of the process. More precisely, if any of the products we interact with is less than the mental image in the memories, users might reject it on conscious and subconscious levels. The seeking of ease is based on cognitive fluency which refers to the subjective experience of completing a mental task.

I assume the main reason for the convergence or even the sameness in design outputs is to meet these basic expectations of what some website or logo should look like. A study by Google stated that users will judge websites as beautiful or not within 1/50th to 1/20th of a second and visually complex websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts. So, some might think design convergence is not a bad thing. Actually, Paul Boag mentions that it is inevitable as our industry matures and good design is about working within constraints. (2016)

On the contrary of leaning to this sameness, it is vital to find reasons that support the design choices since the design is mostly about problem-solving. I believe the reasoning is the difference between poor design and simplified design. And it is not reasonable for me to fix a thing that wasn’t broken in the first place?


Patreon Old and New Logo


Here is an example of the simplified logo sample of a popular brand and I assume it is obvious that Patreon taking content away from the visual instead of refining them and making it less recognizable. Sadly, this flattening and simplifying approach is also one of the reasons why all the websites seem alike. Besides their template structure, also all the images and icons ate in the style of corporate Memphis, which is popular because of the trendy image set of Facebook, Alegria. Just like skeuomorphism was popular a decade ago, it is just today’s trend and it is based on a scalable system rooted in flat, minimal, geometric shapes. Well, A.M Cassandre's works dated in the 1920s are mostly flat, simplified graphics, yet they have a character on the contrary of the Alegria replicas. My intention is to focus on how to ensure transferring the experience user/audience while not trading off the character of the work. Making comparison analyses of these kinds of examples might lead me through the process.

Alegria



A.M Cassandre




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