OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Deliverables & Evaluation

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Correspondence

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Design for Ease of Use

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Coding a Website and its Issues

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Deadlines

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Competitor Research

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Logo Ideas

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Initial Ideas

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Contract

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - Meeting Notes

OUGD603 - MARYAMELE - The Brief

OUGD603 - Go Higher West Yorkshire - Deliverables & Evaluation

OUGD603 - Go Higher West Yorkshire - Brainstorming

OUGD603 - Go Higher West Yorkshire - Competitor Research

OUGD603 - Go Higher West Yorkshire - Initial Ideas

OUGD603 - Go Higher West Yorkshire - The Brief

OUGD601 - General Notes

OUGD601 - Evaluation

This module has been the most challenging thus far on the course. Proportionate to the difficulty, I also feel I have learnt the most about the psychological and socio-political elements of design in these few months than I ever have before. The depth that I have been able to research into dwarfs any research I did in previous years. I feel that I was intimidated by the vocabulary in sociology texts but after delving into this content, I understand clearly the reasoning behind philosophers, sociologists and designers such as Focault, van Djick and Tanner. In fact, the author of one of the books I cited in my essay was impressed with my writing which has given me a confidence boost in the academic portion of the course. 

I began my project trying to write about things that already interested me, which led me to trends in musical niches, such as vaporwave. The idea that an Internet community of individuals that have never even met eachother can produce an entire genre is still fascinating to me. This led me to research further into the Internet and how communities are created online, which linked to trends. I brought this back into the design world and how designers have ease of access to the industry more than ever before, and I wondered what the implications of this would be. Would the industry be consumed by the concept of supply and demand, or would the industry follow the concept of survival of the fittest? When researching this content, I found very little to go on and thought it would be interesting to write about a subject that has very scarcely been touched on before. The fact that the technology I wrote about was so new made it quite difficult to find relevant information to cite, but this increased my ability to find relevant content exponentially.

I was able to gather primary research that I was actually able to rely on instead of the usual questionnaires and informal conversations in the college. As well as adding professionalism to my essay, it provided me with a basis to research. Instead of simply researching with personal perspectives on the subject, I was able to procure multiple perspectives, and found avenues of research I wouldn't have would it have not been for my primary research.

In terms of what I have done well, I believe I was able to identify problems within my topic of research and back my points up with relevant sources, even when the amount of information I was able to find was scarce. I created a practical project that synthesised extremely well with my dissertation, a process that was highlighted as crucial by tutors for this module.

In terms of improvement, I would have liked to be able to create a series of posters as well as my online suite of elements and physically place them in and around London, as this would have reached an even larger amount of designers. I would've tactically placed them in areas where there are congregations of design studios, in order to appropriately target my advertising. However, both budget and time constraints limit this, due to having to actually travel to London, print multiple large posters and transport them.

In conclusion, this was an extremely rewarding module which has taught me a multitude of things, including the ability to write with concise means, how to find relevant information about a topic that isn't directly related or isn't "easy" to search for and the ability to think with a whole project in mind in order to create something that is linked, instead of thinking about each part of a project separately, e.g the marketing campaign of a product and the presentation boards you would use to pitch to a client should be linked, as this correctly puts forward a solid concept instead of a mashup.

OUGD601 - Synthesis

My project was interlinked from the start, with purpose. I intended from writing the dissertation to identify issues within the design industry in some form, and present a design solution within the practical part of the project. This worked extremely well because my project worked well as both standalone entities and were only improved by being shown together. I began the project with inspiration from niche artists on Soundcloud, which developed into researching what began trends. As I continued my research, the breadth of the topic only increased, and my practical project became harder and harder to achieve as more issues were identified. I decided that I would solve one problem instead of trying to address them all, as that would require countless hours because of the complexities of the issues.

Another big advantage I had with my project was the quality of primary research I had obtained. I was able to talk to both an author of a book that closely followed my line of research, and an employee at Facebook, one of the main companies I wrote about in my essay and one of the largest changes in digital culture in the past decade. These were crucial in trying to create a successful practical project as I was able to apply their advice to the concept of my design, of which both of them suggested education. The main takeaway from both encounters was that the new age of designers will beckon a new design process. The agency model, retromania, both concepts that required society to remain still, something that clearly isn't going to happen with the rapid advancement of technology in contemporary culture. For example, I was able to articulate the fact that the cultural implications of the Internet are yet to be properly researched, and will only make themselves known through time, for better or for worse. 

"There are also downsides to it, erm, I think the positives definitely outweigh the negatives but we still don’t know where it’s going, I think in a hundred years we’ll be like “Crap! We were just, like, taking in so much information on a daily basis; more than our brain can handle” and now we’re so hyper-connected to one another, we’re more anxious, we feel more, when someone dies that we don’t even know, like “damn so and so celebrity died!” A hundred years ago no one cared about that because you never found out about it. Erm, but at the same time, looking at where the world has come in 2016 with all the segregation and politics and arm, stuff that Trump’s doing, the Internet is a great way of changing peoples’ perceptions."

In conclusion, making sure my project synthesised well between the theoretical and practical elements strengthened my submission and forced me to make more calculated design decisions instead of simply doing whatever came to my mind. As opposed to creating a practical project that lightly touched on the subject of contemporary design culture such as mimicking trends, I identified and presented a solution to a problem that I found only from my essay.

OUGD601 [Practical] - Deliverables

I created a range of deliverables in order to appeal to my target audience. This included a publication (of which I decided against), an instagram page to post weekly designs and a website to archive said designs in a more conventional format. 

OUGD601 - Time Management

I used the Gantt chart above for long term timekeeping, and kept to do lists updated daily within the stickies app of my Macbook. This meant I was able to track both long and short term goals and kept me focused on whatever task I had at hand, crucially allowing me to focus on one element at a time instead of worrying about how much time I would allocate to each separate element.

OUGD601 - E-Mail Correspondence

Grafton Tanner – Author

To: Grafton Tanner

Sent: 23/11/16

RE: Dissertation Research Request

Hello Grafton,

I'm a third year Graphic Design student in the UK. I'm currently in the process of writing my dissertation based on the subject of cultural changes with the introduction of the new millennium. I've investigated subjects such as the socio-political and socio-cultural impact of social media in the western world, and the process of Retromania consuming the graphic design industry in recent years.

Babbling Corpse was a read that had me agreeing with almost all of your points and has really helped me articulate my dissertation as finding scholarly sources to do with such a modern subject has proved quite difficult. I'm currently undergoing some primary research for my writing and I'd love to ask you a few questions to get your take on the cultural impact to design. I know you primarily focus on music in your writing, but I feel that this addiction to nostalgia is ever-more present in design as the years go by.

I first read Babbling Corpse as an avid vaporwave listener, but it has been one of my favourite reads on the subject out of the countless texts I've gone through this year! I hope you can find the time to help me out, but I appreciate that you may be too busy.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Christopher Mahoney

From: Grafton Tanner

Date: 24/11/2016

Hi Christopher,

Greetings from the states, and thank you for the kind words. I'm thrilled you enjoyed the book. I'd be happy to answer any questions for your dissertation. What school are you attending?

All the best,

Grafton

To: Grafton Tanner

Date: 24/11/2016

Hello Grafton,

Anytime! Thanks for the help, would it be okay to send a few questions through tomorrow? What timezone are you in? I'm attending Leeds College of Art, it's an interesting degree because it encourages us to keep a synthesis between our theoretical and practical projects, something i'm not used to!

Cheers,

Chris

From: Grafton Tanner

Chris,

Yes feel free to email me any questions you have. I live in Georgia, so I am in the Eastern time zone.

Best,

Grafton

To: Grafton Tanner

Date: 28/11/2016

Hey Grafton,

Hope you're doing well. Apologies for the delay, I had some feedback with my tutor on the direction of my essay. Here are the questions, but feel free to simply use them as talking points as I've just used them to stimulate the subject I'm writing about. Thanks for your help!

What is your stance on the use of Social Media in the modern age, for both personal and commercial purposes?

In your publication, you describe a recent phenomenon of retromania, do you think there is a solution to this cultural regression? Is there an element of a cyclical nature?

What are your predictions on the evolution of the internet in the next ten years?

Regards,

Chris

From: Grafton Tanner

Date: 29/11/2016

Chris,

Thank you for the questions. Here are my replies:

1. The social, economic, and psychological consequences of social media are already beginning to show. The cultural critiques of social media are now going mainstream in light of the discovery that Silicon Valley has no regard for the human consequences of their products. I'm thinking of Black Mirror, especially, which does an expert job of revealing the horror underneath our Instagrammed lives (although I often wish they would push the envelope even further). Even Moby's latest album is a takedown of our techno-moment: plugged-in, distracted, bored, throwaway, and trapped. The evidence cannot hide anymore. The public is becoming more aware of how digital technologies affect us.

Social media platforms are engineered to hook us on a dopaminergic level. In this way, Silicon Valley is like Big Tobacco, except cancer does not carry the stigma depression, loneliness, and anxiety do. Would we allow our children to smoke at age thirteen? To think that the health effects of smoking are greater in severity than those of social media use misses the point. Both Big Tobacco and Silicon Valley use the best propaganda to sell us products. Neither care about the consequences, and thanks to unfettered capitalism, they will never be made to care. And thanks to the stigma associated with psychogenic disorders in the West, advocates for a healthier future will have a tougher time slowing down Silicon Valley than did those who waged war on Big Tobacco.

There's a bonus here: social media gives us the power to police ourselves. The NSA can sit back and comb through our metadata in this post-9/11 corporate state we are in. Social media users are tracked and monitored, and their data are sold to the highest bidders. It is unconscionable. 

It is worrisome that many social media users do not care about these kinds of privacy breaches. Perhaps they don't understand the severity. If people want to smoke cigarettes after learning the side effects, then so be it. The same thought applies to social media. But I would urge people to use social media with distance - to understand when you're on Facebook and when you're not. To resist the urge to brand yourself online. To educate others on the problems that come with social media use. To put up the phones and have conversations with people. And to never get your news from Facebook.

Unfortunately, it would be commercial suicide for a business to not have a social media presence. I have no problem with social media being used for commercial purposes. When the tactics used to promote a product's Facebook page are employed for personal branding, though, that is troubling.

2. Retromania is definitely cyclical. Simon Reynolds is a good resource on how pop culture has always used the images and sounds of the past to keep afloat. What is significant about twenty-first century retromania is its ubiquity. Everyone can remember the same memory even if that memory is false. More importantly, there has never been a more urgent time to be aware of history. Corporations must peddle amnesia in order to keep neoliberalism on life support, and the more people consume pain-free nostalgia, the easier it is for corporate capitalism to run us all into oblivion. 

A solution will come from the artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers who refuse to create reactionary nostalgia, like the kind of surface-level object pornography in Stranger Things. One of the greatest failures of contemporary culture is the lack of indie and mainstream music critical of the eight years between Bush and Trump - the Obama years. Once identity politics became the only game in town, nearly any music that protested the rise of the corporate democrats vanished. The world desperately needed for artists to call out the massive bank bailout of 2008 and the right for Obama to detain and assassinate at will. It's not enough for indie musicians to refuse anyone the right to take a photograph at a live show. We need artists of all kinds to stop creating surface-level homages to the 1980s and to remember the vital hope of the "new" again.

3. The Internet is a rehearsal for virtual reality. Once VR is affordable and goes public, there is no turning back. We will trade the profiles of real people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. for their virtual representations. This is the logical endpoint of the Internet. By giving consumers a wearable headset that projects whatever fabricated world they could desire, companies will ultimately bring about a society in which everyone who can afford a device can have limitless control over simulated surroundings. If virtual reality will be anything like the Internet, the majority of people will use it to fulfill sexual fantasies and quell the fear of being alone.

We may not have very long to wait for these things to come to pass.  The augmented and virtual reality market is a billion dollar industry, and interest in it has piqued thanks to headsets like the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift device. For those in the industry, virtual reality is the very mark of “the future.” Ironically, virtual reality devices trade more in the market of regressive goods than in any market of “the future.” Virtual reality promises a world made for each of us, our own island where we can be a virtual Prospero in control of every facet of simulated life. Ultimately we can return to a more childlike state where our every need was met and the world was one that revolved around us alone. By knowing anything we or Silicon Valley dream up can become a reality, we can live in one virtual world after another, no matter how infantile or deviant those worlds may be.

What may seem at first like a fresh pursuit of the future is actually a desperate attempt to escape the bonds of the human condition and retreat to some utopian, childlike state. No one will stop the creation of mass-marketed, affordable VR. There will be little discussion about the psycho-social implications, and even so, would we not all sign on the dotted line? 

Let me know if you have any more questions or would like to talk further.

Best,

Grafton Tanner

To: Grafton Tanner

Date: 30/11/2016

Grafton,

Thanks for your time and answers, I'll let you know if there are any more questions that pop up and I'll be sure to send you a copy of the essay if you're interested.

Regards,

Chris

From: Grafton Tanner

Date: 30/11/2016

Absolutely, Chris. And yes, I'd love a copy of the essay.

Best,

Grafton

To: Grafton Tanner

Date: 08/12/2016

Re: A Question

Hello Grafton,

Hope you are doing well, I am almost finished with my essay however I'm having trouble trying to come up with a design solution to the regression of society through technology. It's such a complex issue that it's hard to come up with a solution to the problem at all – never mind a design-based solution. I just wanted to ask your thoughts on the issue and if you felt that there was anything designers specifically could do to change the course of the downward spiral western culture is undergoing.

I've attached a draft of my current essay, I'd love for you to give me your thoughts on what could be improved and the direction I could take from now!

Regards,

Christopher 

From: Grafton Tanner

Date: 09/12/2016

Hey Christopher,

Read through your essay. It's very good so far. I didn't actually coin the term "retromania." I'm not sure who did, but writer Simon Reynolds popularized it. Check out some of his work for more analysis of retro-baiting.

I think there are multiple ways to arrive at a solution. First, Web 2.0 effectively destroyed creative industries. Why pay a graphic designer when you can just copy an image from Google Images? Why would anyone buy a design or a photograph when they can just look at it for free by following someone's Instagram account? In the attention economy, created by the rise of social media, a knee-jerk reaction is the grail. This need for impulsive likes and followers eliminates sustained critiques and reflection. A piece of retro-bait is surface-level; you don't need to parse it to understand what it signifies. An image of a 1980s ad for Coca-Cola works as a memory trigger, prompting someone to press the "like" button and scroll onwards. Nobody wants design that is future-forward or that challenges the status quo, not when we would rather scroll the boards of Instagram and get our dopamine fix from seeing images that make us nostalgic. The solution would be to create design that challenges our relationship to social media and that refuses to take part in retro-baiting. Also, charge fees for design services. Don't give away your work for free on Instagram. Desperately and vehemently rally for the "new."

OUGD601 [Practical] - Brief Outline

Brief

Create a project intended to educate both new and seasoned designers (with a focus on new designers, however) on finding success in the design industry. The focal points of the project should include:

• Ethics
• Mindset
• Money
• Finding clients
• General knowledge

Target Audience

Designers, with a focus on graphic designers.

18-45, large age group to accommodate the majority of designers included in the digital age

Deliverables

A project or campaign (either online, offline or both) containing but not limited to:

• Publication
• Website
• Social Media

OUGD601 [Practical] - Brainstorm

OUGD601 - Essay Structure & Reasoning

Essay Structure



0. Contents

1. Introduction

• Introduce your topic
• Present an argument
• Talk about the content coming up

2. Chapter One: The Place of Web 2.0 in Modern Culture

• Formation of the Internet
• Social Media and its' implications
• Pros and cons
• Relate to argument and design

3. Chapter Two: Commodification in Graphic Design

• Online marketing info
• Ethics
• Relate to society as a whole

4. Chapter Three: The Transfer of Power

• Evolution of consumer producer relationship
• Online activism
• Cultural implications e.g globalisation
• Relate to design and marketing

5. Chapter Four: Anonymity, or Accountability?

• Talk about current politics
• Pros and cons of anon vs non-anon
• Governmental surveillance
• Cookies logging web info

6. Chapter Five: The Importance of Graphic Design

• Case study of a company making good use of design
• Explain the difference between good and bad design
• Talk about the changes design has gone through in the past to now

7. Conclusion

• Sum up the argument
• Take a stance
• Explain your reasoning

8. Appendices

OUGD601 [Practical] - The Problem

The problem that I identified in my essay is the effects of neo-capitalism where companies hold ultimate power over even the government. This in turn creates a society where commodification runs ripe and consumerism runs awry, and requires consumers to be more wary than ever with purchases. Information obtained through website browsing is used as marketing information and sold on to advertising agencies, creating an Orwellian scenario where users are only worth as much as their purchases and market research information. For designers, it is becoming harder to avoid the grasp of consumerism and easier to lull themselves into designing without applying ethics, morals or any self-beliefs. The aim of the project was as follows:

Create a guide for designers both new and seasoned on adaptation and creating for time to come. Educate the masses on the techniques that top-level design studios use and how they think. Encourage design that remains in line with the designers' beliefs and morals, and remind them of movements in the past such as Modernism that were about seeking progress as a society, and not simply monetary gain. A large portion of design in the world is poorly thought out in aspect(s), how can this be changed to create a design manifesto?

OUGD601 - Facebook Transcription

I was given the chance to visit the Facebook + Instagram HQ in London throughout the Christmas break. This was very advantageous as these are the two dominating social medias in contemporary culture and I was able to gain a window into how the services operate, and the ethos of the designers that work for the company. The company was very professional, requiring an officer to escort me to the floor I was meeting the employee on, and requiring a search before I was able to enter the premises. It felt almost clinical and secretive, something that contradicts the ethos of Mark Zuckerberg, complete transparency.

Below is the transcription between me and the employee:

C: So just to tell you what I’m writing about at the moment, in more detail so you know what I’m talking about, it’s about the influence of technology and its’ influence on western culture as well as its influence on design culture, specifically. 

N: Yeah.

C: So, just to start, how do you feel social media in general has affected our culture, for good or worse? In terms of like, social etiquette, transparency, that kind of thing.

N: Considering where I work, I’d like to say it’s connecting the world. That is this places’ mission. There are also downsides to it, erm, I think the positives definitely outweigh the negatives but we still don’t know where it’s going, I think in a hundred years we’ll be like “Crap! We were just, like, taking in so much information on a daily basis; more than our brain can handle” and now we’re so hyper-connected to one another, we’re more anxious, we feel more, when someone dies that we don’t even know, like “damn so and so celebrity died!” A hundred years ago no one cared about that because you never found out about it. Erm, but at the same time, looking at where the world has come in 2016 with all the segregation and politics and arm, stuff that Trump’s doing, the Internet is a great way of changing peoples’ perceptions. Those closed-net narrow minded communities, that only see one type of opinion, can now have access to other types of news although there is a kind of echo chamber, but that’s always been down to the media in general.

C: Yeah, how do you feel it’s affected recent events, such as the U.S Election, general politics, that kind of thing?

N: I think that’s all B.S that’s been created by the media, because if it’s a fake news thing, the people that spoke about ‘fake news’ the most are the Daily Mail, other tabloids who have made a life.. their whole business is based on fake news. So it’s kind of ironic, them accusing new-age media of creating fake news.

C: It’s kind of just exacerbating the problem.

N: And the people that post the fake news are people like the Daily Mail.

C: Yeah. For Sure.

N: (laughs) 

C: Kinda just, hypocrisy.

N: Yeah, its just a full circle of hypocrisy all around. But I think.. it’s good that is being addressed now. That being flagged up meant certain validations have to be made from now on. There has to be a UN type of thing validating news articles. So it’s definitely going to challenge people’s perceptions of the media. 

C: There’s actually websites now that use machine learning to write their articles, they’ll have these web crawlers that scan articles and be able to publish an article within seconds without any moderation. I think that’s a part of being in the infancy of the Internet, though. 

N: Yeah, and if you look at sites like Yahoo News, they take articles from every other website and they’ll just add credit to them at the bottom. That can easily be replicated by a bot, and that’s what people are doing just for the sake of hits. The way  web journalism has changed from longford editorial newspapers to now like, top 10 shots of Kim Kardashian’s booty!

C: Yeah.

N: Complex dot com and Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed’s great because they have a point of view, whereas some others are just clickbait nonsense.

C: Just trying to get your click.

N: Yeah.

C: So, I actually wrote about Facebook in my essay, because it’s quite a big part of Web 2.0, and I thought it was good and bad at the lengths Facebook want to go to hold people accountable for what they want to do. So what’s your personal view, distancing yourself from Facebook a bit, on anonymity vs. accountability, so, how much of yourself you put on the internet and etc.

N: On a personal level, I’m really open on the Internet, I always have been prior to even joining this place. I think that’s just the generation that I’ve grown up in. Some of my friends are the complete opposite, they don’t share anything. They share like, just the highlight reel. I kinda want to share everything from the lowlights to the highlights because that’s just me. You’ve gotta be real. I don’t want to just put a fake front on. Yeah I’m not gonna be “I smoke weed all the time” because I don’t, and even if you do, be a bit smarter than that. Five years down the line when anyone wants to hire you, they can just go down your feed and see. This year a friend of mine went on the X Factor and did horrifically bad. My first thing to him was “You know every employer is going to search your name and see that” (laughs) I think I’m going to loop back to the first question quickly, on the positive side, we’ve seen with this year with the stuff happening in Paris for example, we’ve seen a surge of movements like Pray for Paris, that started off with one illustration and that got shared millions, not billions but millions of times. Each person sharing their own interpretations of events. It’s just people coming together for a cause. Aleppo. 150 years ago or even 50 years ago, most people wouldn’t know about it, most people may not care about it but now people want to take action. Still don’t know what kind of action, there’s a lot of ‘slacktivism’, erm, but we know about it now. Most people who do a bit more reading into it realise it’s about oil, not actually about the people there.

C: Yeah, this might be slightly conspiracy speak, but I feel as if the government has less control over what the people are able to see. With the Internet, it’s free to be accessed from around the world. Would you agree?

N: Yeah, totally. There’s a great documentary on Freud, it was on Channel Four about fifteen years ago, I recommend you watch it. It tells you about the growth of P.R in corporations and it kinda went from power in the corporations and big TV to now the people. That’s what Social Media has done. It’s given them a platform to become the creators, to become voices. Before, only a handful like Martin Luther King and Gandhi would just create a following but now you can do that through sitting at home.

C: I actually wrote about that sort’ve thing last year, about how the consumer has begun to take power away from the producer and how there’s a power struggle going on with the introduction of new-age media. It’s interesting to see you agree with that.

N: Yeah, and modern day activism is much more accessible. Black Lives Matter, for example, was created purely through online. It’s become so big.

C: I don’t think it would’ve done that without the Internet. So, I also wrote about programs like Black Mirror that make comments on technology advancing faster than society, how do you feel that we could limit and regulate ourselves because there’s going to be virtual reality coming out soon, and there’s going to be automation, I mean, there’s already self-driving cars being trialled. How do you feel that we can regulate that, and make sure we’re in check?

N: I don’t even know where to start with that. I think this is probably a wider view and someone needs to go more in-depth, but I think someone needs to create a technology treaty to regulate us. People will use technology for the wrong reasons, just like when the inventor of AK-47s had no idea of the things it would end up being used for. There are evil people out there that will look to use A.I for military purposes and killing others. I don’t know if we can regulate it until something bad happens, that’s when people will realise we screwed up. Like, the Tesla self driving car, I think someone died last year, and that was due to a glare hitting the cameras on the car and that caused them to fix up. But that’s a really small small thing in the scale of things. With A.I and VR, it’s a completely different ball game. 

C: So something that’s just gonna develop over time.

N: Yeah, I think it’s like the Internet, there’s a lot more privacy and laws in place now, none of that existed in its’ creation. Just the last ten years when commerce became big. 

C: Erm, bit more Graphic Design related, with the saturation of designers coming into the industry and the notion of being able to become a designer from your bedroom, how do you see the industry going if this kind of growth continues, you see websites like PeoplePerHour promoting designers for five pounds an hour. It’s a bit crazy. I’ve seen that people have been undervaluing design as a whole, because there’s so many designers, you can get someone to do something for so cheap. People just see the physical element rather than the psychological element behind work. 

N: Marketing techniques and such, yeah, so I think: several factors, some people just don’t get design. People will always undervalue it because they just don’t understand the process and they think design is just using Photoshop or even Word and writing something and printing it out. You’ll still get that with low-level clients. The high level clients, agencies and design studios will never go away. Like, you need people that understand the psychology of design like branding, identity, theme. But we do live in an age of mediocrity, and the Internet has been a part of this. Everyone can be a creator now, but that doesn’t mean everyone can be a good creator. It’s like, people think that just because they’ve got 20,000 Instagram followers they’re a photographer. Yeah they’ve got a certain eye for it, and they can produce some good work but it doesn’t mean you can go and shoot a campaign for an editorial on TIME magazine. You need some level of craft. I still believe, like, it’s going to increase the creative quality. There’s so much saturation now that it forces people to think out of the box even more, to stand out more. I actually shared something on my Instagram stories yesterday, a poster by Saul Bass. The quote says “I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” It kinda sums up out generation where we live now. It’s all about validation, like “can I create something so I can get it to 10,000 likes, or more followers?” Why aren’t we creating something just out of the love of it? Err, another great reference is six years ago another great documentary came out, I can’t believe it’s six years ago now, called Pause Press Play. It’s great, it touches on the subject of creativity being in the palm of your hands, before something like Photoshop. Making music was so high level for example, but now kids, Soulection is just a bunch of kids making music on Soundcloud. But it’s forced leaders to adapt and innovate. If you don’t adapt, you disappear. That’s why companies like Blockbuster failed to adapt, they failed to innovate and Netflix took over. I think a lot of brands don’t have the insight to innovate. Argos was one of the companies fading away because of Amazon and now they’ve clocked on that the Internet is way more important than they thought. They’ve now launched same-day delivery so I now look at both websites. 

C: Coming back to what you were saying, that the Internet is making us a bit more mediocre, do you feel that creativity is easier or harder to express now that there’s so much information out there that it’s hard not to be copying something accidentally. 

N: I think it’s easier to creatively express yourself, but to creatively express something original is a lot harder. I one hundred percent believe in you creating what you consume. So if you fill your brain with shit, you’re going to end up creating shit. I think that’s why the current design wave is so minimal, and it’s actually a bit boring now. I feel like, the opposite will happen next year. One of the trends will be messy, messy design coming back, because it’s just too clean right now. Minimalism has its place, but the trend is without form and function as its’ root. 

C: How do designers stay true to their ethics and morals, in this society where its hard to be an independent small studio that designs simply for clients they like? 

N: I think that comes back to the whole, personal work and doing work to pay the bills. It’s a very fine line, sometimes I make work I want and sometimes you just have to hit targets and pay bills. I don’t believe that small studios can’t function, I think small studios more than ever have the opportunity to change the way things are done. They can demonstrate their skill set in this sea of minimalism. Also, the agency model is changing. It needs to adapt. The whole paying an agency £1000 a day for someone as a day rate, and the designer gets like fifty quid. Paying an independent studio £1000 for a day will probably book the whole agency. A friend of mine runs Studio Koto, and Koto just did the rebrand for Gumtree, some Diet Coke stuff, they just launched the Airbnb’s experiences concept. They’re about 14 people in total. They launched two years ago with two people, so yeah I think it’s just about connections and who you know, and I know that every job I’ve ever got is through my connections and not from websites like LinkedIn. I’ve never actually applied for a job which sounds like me being boastful but it was from my portfolio, I started my blog because I was a bored kid in uni, and my best friend and me started it because we wanted to express what we liked. Five years on, I left two years ago but it was time to leave because the Internet was changing, and I wanted to work with new people so I wrote an e-mail to Levi’s and said “Hey, look, your Instagram is crap. Can I pitch as a freelancer to help run it?” I already had a connection to there from my blogging days and they told me they were struggling and they’d welcome my pitch. So I pitched and they said “Look, we’ve got X amount of thousands of pounds, if you can pitch well this is all yours”. Although at the time I was getting married, I couldn’t take the risk of quitting my day job to manage Facebook and Twitter. I didn’t really want to manage social media, I just wanted to create. I said no, and the next day I saw this job listed and I tweeted “Do I know anyone from Facebook and Instagram?” and I actually met my office manager at Facebook through that tweet. She put me in an interview and here I am.