Designing in the Renaissance Era
For the past five years, especially post-pandemic – design has been trapped in a paradox. A paradox that we all feel, some more deeply than others.
Organizations have invested more in design than ever before; yet much of the work has become increasingly standardized. Templates replaced systems. Trends replaced thinking. Entire industries began to resemble one another. Scroll through enough websites, apps, and brand identities and a sameness is evident that gives us all a sort of "meh" malaise about a brand that looks the same as the rest.
In over-indexing on efficiency, said efficiency became the aesthetic.
Up until now.
Design is in the midst of a renaissance era.
Originality, perspective, and human creativity are becoming exponentially more valuable. Just look at the recent brand video Porsche put out, featuring hand-drawn, custom illustrations within an animated film that had their core audience raving about it. Why? Because it was thoughtful, intentional, and rallied against the typical SaaS-style animation aesthetic every single brand video has nowadays.
"Get ready to see a whole lot more Serif activity.”
Sure, we live in an age of infinite production; but that also dramatically flattens out the bell curve for what most identities look, feel, and sound like nowadays.
Recently, I was reading the book "Algorithm" by Kyle Chayka, and it touched on the fact that the globalization of the internet and algorithms have effectively flattened culture: every coffee shop goes for the same Instagrammable aesthetic nowadays, for example. Branding is also no stranger to this.
