Blog
06.03
Is Bad Design Good Design? A Frightening Realization About Our Acclimation to Crap
Debra Messing as Grace Adler said it best when she blurted, "I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone. And all the people are pigs. And I'm the pretty one, but everyone thinks I'm ugly because they're all pigs and they think pigs are pretty."
In February, I renewed my Texas drivers license online. A snappy 14 weeks later I received this fresh new wallet-sized hell:
Poor Janice Sample. She's perky. She put on her best turtleneck and spent, like, three hours on those ginger bangs, only to have her image surrounded by... how do I put this delicately... ah, yes... design vomit. This new license design was rolled out in 2009, apparently. Had no idea. I tried finding out who produced it, but finally gave up after my Google search for "worst thing ever" kept returning image results for Ke$ha.
Around the same time I was assaulted by my horrendous new drivers license, I began noticing that cars on the highway suddenly seemed much, much uglier, which was weird because they don't make Pontiac Azteks anymore. Then I took a closer look and got this in my eye:
Oh holy mother of mercy, it burns, it burns. Well, on the bright side, at least the dude that used to design Trapper Keepers finally got work again. For those of you unaware, you are basking in the glow of the new(ish) Texas license plate, rolled out in the summer of not 1989, but 2009. I had no idea, but apparently there was a public online vote, and 450,000 Texans chose this gem.
Yep. It's one thing to blame one person for making a bad design decision. It's another thing to blame nearly half a million people. I know for a fact there are not 450,000 morbidly obese shut-ins in this state. So what gives?
Maybe people like complete and utter crap.
With that thought, I Googled "complete and utter crap" to see what else people might like. And got this in return:
Ah, yes, the GoDaddy ads. Watching them, I always got the notion that they were the brainchild of a cheap, lecherous old frat guy who thinks offensive stereotypes are funny and wanted to validate his mid-life crisis by finding an excuse to surround himself with hookers. When I searched for GoDaddy's ad agency, I discovered the commercials are actually produced on a shoestring budget in-house, and CEO Bob Parsons, who from the looks of his blog is clearly not having a mid-life crisis, thinks they are fine-just-fine for family viewing. Just when I thought I'd validated my observational genius, my aforementioned notion was dashed when I discovered GoDaddy's CMO, the person who claims responsibility for all marketing, is... wait for it... a giraffe. Okay, no, just messing with you. As you suspected, their CMO is, in fact, female.
That tangent aside, the commercials remain relatively popular, probably due only to Danica Patrick's on-camera speaking skills, which are certainly not, as you might suggest, comparable to those of a wet stump.
Knowing the GoDaddy ads had routinely made headlines for their controversy, I decided to Google "complete and utter crap" and "news" and was immediately sent to drudgereport.com.
Behold. I know conservatives are sometimes resistant to change, but come on, this is just silly. Nevertheless, old man Drudge waxes up this ancient Internet Buick and drives it daily to an Alexa rating that is currently more than six times that of the beautifully designed MSNBC.com. Back in 2008, Jason Fried of 37signals, possibly (but for legal purposes, definitely not) mad from syphillis, called the Drudge Report "one of the best designed sites on the web," excusing this insane declaration by expanding his definition of "design" to include everything but.
Just when I thought I couldn't feel any worse about the state of design, the Capital One logo jumped out from behind a banner ad, poked me in the eye with its stupid red boomerang, and ran off with my wallet.
Wounded, I shut my laptop and stared at the wall.
Sometimes, a client will make a problematic design suggestion to an agency and pressure that agency to execute it. Often, a well-meaning person within the agency will direct the protesting designer to, "just do what they ask so they can see how bad it looks." In a perfect world, this should work. The client should see this poor execution, realize his or her misjudgement and choose one of the agency's original concepts. But almost invariably, this tactic backfires when the client loves seeing their own idea come to life, and the agency is forced to send bad design into the ether.
But is it really bad? Welcome to my existential design crisis. If you meditate long enough (or shoot enough Jagermeister), love and hate can become the same emotion. Like and dislike can merge. And bad and good are indiscernible. All that's left is one single emotion for which we have no word. Rather than love or hate someone, you just "feel" toward them. Rather than fear or delight in an experience, you just "feel" at it. Does is matter how much the Drudge Report design sucks if you just "feel" at it?
I hope you are not expecting a satisfying conclusion, because I certainly can't do anything but postulate and ask for your opinions. If 95 percent of the design people see daily is crap, and is accepted as the norm, do they really know any better? Do they still know bad from good? Maybe yes and no. I am encouraged by thinking of the reactions I've seen to Apple's still-delightful packaging, to Betty White's charming resurgence and even the public outcry over Tropicana's misguided 2009 carton redesign. Maybe crowd mentality simply cannot handle abstract thought. If people never experience good design, they may not know any better than to praise efforts that edge above the daily crap they mistakenly perceive as average.
Poor Janice Sample. If only she could see beyond what surrounds her.
shawn.wood
And that is copywriting at HCK2 is such a lovely thing. HAHAHA!
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