Month: September 2012
Pecha Kucha: Pretty Ugly
Pecha Kucha Beitrag über das Buch “Pretty Ugly” von Gestalten Verlag.
Ceative Review: June 2012
The June issue of CR comes with a health warning. It contains content that readers of a nervous disposition and a love of classical typography may find disturbing. Things are going to get ugly.
Skewed, stretched type, clashing colours, too little or too much spacing – across Europe a new generation of designers and art directors is breaking every rule. But is their work rebellion for rebellion’s sake or does it have wider implications for visual communications? In the June issue CR interviews Martin Lorenz and Lupi Asensio of Barcelona design studio TwoPoints.Net, editors of new book Pretty Ugly: Visual Rebellion in Graphic Design.
Pretty Ugly or plain ugly? by Patrick Burgoyne (CR)
Poster for one of a series of weekly film nights run by artist Wim Lambrecht at college Sint-Lucas Visual Arts Gent from 2007 to 2008. Designed by Raf Vancampenhoudt with Joris Van Aken
Skewed, stretched type, clashing colours, too little or too much spacing – across Europe a new generation of designers and art directors is breaking every rule. But is their work rebellion for rebellion’s sake or does it have wider implications for visual communications?
The June issue of CR (out May 23) comes with a health warning. It contains content that readers of a nervous disposition and a love of classical typography may find disturbing. Things are going to get ugly.
Back in 2007, I wrote a piece suggesting that something new and decidedly strange was happening
in graphic design and art direction, based mainly upon the look of two magazines: Super Super (spread shown above) and 032c. In it I referred to an earlier Eye essay by Steven Heller on what he termed the ‘Cult of the Ugly’.
Heller was writing about the work coming out of Cranbrook Academy of Art in the 90s, work that deliberately sought to subvert our ideas of ‘good design’. What I saw in Super Super and 032c could, I thought, herald a New Ugly aesthetic in response to changes in the way younger readers consumed information online and a desire to, once again, challenge the status quo.
From a series of posters for the Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks by Bureau Mirko Borsche using a mixture of classical serif type (to represent tradition), and the angular bespoke face Andri12000, representing the orchestra’s modern spirit and the musicians in evevning dress
Five years later comes the publication of Pretty Ugly, a new book that brings together graphic design, imagemaking and product design which very much delivers on that promise. In the Pretty Ugly, type is skewed, stretched and set at unreadable angles; images are distorted with a will; colours clash resoundingly. Some of it is beautiful, some interesting, some just awful.
Untitled. Design: Andrea Crews. Photography: Simon de la Poife, 2010
“It is a new kind of beauty that isn’t based upon pure visual pleasure, it is a beauty based upon context-driven design, being transparent with working methods, tools and materials,” claim the book’s editors, Martin Lorenz and Lupi Asensio of Barcelona design studio TwoPoints.Net, who came up with the Pretty Ugly term to describe the ‘movement’ and who are interviewed in the new issue of CR.
CR interviews the editors of Pretty Ugly in the June issue of the magazine
Die Neue K is the free quarterly newspaper of the Royal Academy of Art at Leiden University. Design: Rob van den Nieuwenhuizen ( of Drawswords in Amsterdam) with Mattijs de Wit
Contribution to the My Monkey, My Network group exhibition organised by arts group Le Club des Chevreuils in Nancy, France, designed by Pierre Delmas Bouly and Patrick Lallemand of Lyon-based Superscript, 2008
“There are obvious aesthetic qualities connecting the work,” they say, “intentionally ‘bad’ typography; using system typefaces like Arial, Helvetica or Times; stretching them; having too much or too little letter or line spacing; deforming type on a scanner or a copier. The Pretty Ugly is a movement against the established criteria of what ‘good design’ is, in order to regain the attention of the audience and explore new territory. Entering the world of ‘wrong’ freed these designers and made any kind of experiment possible, without worrying about being thought unprofessional. Mistakes turned into virtuosity, a sign of authenticity and humanity. But it isn’t a movement that does wrong because it doesn’t know better. This is a highly educated generation of designers using their knowledge to break with what they were given as rules. They use intuition as much as intellect in order to enter new territory that is beyond so called ‘professionalism’.”
Hmmm, so we are into the “if I do it, it’s meant to look bad, if you do it, it’s just bad” territory, always tricky ground to occupy. Are we, the humble viewers and readers, meant to know the difference? Is there one?
German design studio Vier5 was one of the early pioneers of the Pretty Ugly, particularly in its work for French arts centre CAC Brétigny, including this 2003 poster for a show by Dutch artists, designers and architects Atelier Van Lieshout
Also by Vier5, the poster for last year’s Chaumont poster festival
Geographically, most of the work featured hails from Belgium, France, Germany and The Netherlands. The latter gives a clue as to the work’s intellectual origins too. Lorenz and Asensio say “We would guess that many of the seeds of the Pretty Ugly were sown in the Netherlands around 2000, when ‘Default Design’ was hot. At the time, the first issues of Jop van Bennekom’s Re-Magazine using Times and lo-res images taken from the internet, or the work by Maureen Mooren (at that time working with Daniel van der Velden, who is now at Metahaven) and her husband Armand Mevis (working with Linda van Deursen) were all very influential. Many of the the designers featured in our book studied at the design school Werkplaats Typografie, where Armand Mevis teaches.”
Spread from Super Paper, No. 21, July 2011, a publication on Munich nightlife by Studio Mirko Borsche
Perhaps the origins of the work also have something to do with the fact that these countries provide the support for young designers to be experimental – it’s a rather different matter if you are leaving college with £20,000 of debt. Commercially viable work, in those circumstances, has its attractions and not too many brands, as yet, are in the market for 3D stretched Arial. Indeed, most of the work in Pretty Ugly is for very small-scale fashion, music or cultural clients, or self-initiated. But as the recent launch of Mevis and van Deursen’s Stedelijk Museum identity (below) highlighted (see our story here), it is seeping into the mainstream.
Perhaps even the 2012 Olympics logo was an attempt to pick up on early manifestations of the trend and the intentions behind it? At the time of its launch Wolff Olins creative director Patrick Cox claimed that “Its design is intentionally raw, it doesn’t… ask to be liked very much. It was meant to provoke a response, like the little thorn in the chair that gets you to breathe in, sit up and take notice.”
In the US and UK many young designers have turned toward a retro craft aesthetic and a celebration of archaic print techniques – think of the US gig poster scene, much of the work exhibited at Pick Me Up or the Hipster aesthetic satirised so acutely on this recent Tumblr. In comparison, the mostly Northern European approach of The Pretty Ugly feels much more daring and provocative.
Rather than retreating to the comfort of the past, this work seems calculated to upset as many purist notions as possible. It has great energy and verve, blowing away the cobwebs of the watered-down Modernism-as-style that has dominated our ideas of ‘good design’ for so long.
Horst is a German magazine focused on the lifestyles of modern gay men. Design: Mirko Borsche. Cover photograph: Alex Klesta. Illustration: Gian Gisiger
But is there anything more to it than empty rebellion? In Heller’s original piece, he stated that “Ugliness as its own virtue diminishes all design” but that it is justified if it is as a result of form follows function. If the ‘function’ here is to kick over the traces and make us re-examine what ‘good design’ is then maybe it’s working.
We live in an age where everything around us is (to an extent) competently designed: groceries, restaurants, magazines, medicines, all researched and marketed to the nth degree. A professional patina applied. Design as service industry. Compared to the buffed and primped identities of most major organisations, the Stedelijk identity feels refreshingly authentic and honest.
But here’s the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ rub with the Pretty Ugly – if it wasn’t by a famous Dutch design studio and for a major institution, would we give it serious consideration? If we saw it on the side of a builder’s van would it transform from Pretty Ugly to just plain ugly?
Proposals for signage using the new Stedelijk Museum identity system
There’s something undeniably decadent in a group of highly and expensively educated Western designers producing knowingly ‘bad’ work. Are young designers, seeing their older peers’ work becoming more and more devalued, reacting by saying ‘these rules you taught us are not going to earn us a living anyway so let’s see what happens when we break them all’? Increasingly we are hearing mumblings about a ‘post-design world’. Is The Pretty Ugly a refreshing reinvigoration of a visual communications industry that has become too flabby and comfortable, or the outward sign of a profession in crisis?
Article from Creative Review
Was ist Trendforschung? von Matthias Horx
Super Super by Patrick Burgoyne (CR)
“People said ‘what the fuck is that? It looks like a clown’s been sick’.” Not necessarily the response you might hope for when launching a new style magazine, but it didn’t worry Steve Slocombe. As creative director of the fiercely trendy Super Super, Slocombe is used to being, shall we say, “challenged” about his work…
Launched early last year, Super Super’s wilfully distorted typography, day glo colours and total rejection of the holy tenets of magazine design are enough to give more mature art directors a fit of the vapours. It’s MySpace made flesh, with all the clashing cacophony that concept brings to mind.
And yet, according to Slocombe, what underlines it all is “harmony”. “There is nothing in Super Super that is empty or frivolous,” he insists, “everything is there for a reason”.

When it comes to style magazines, Slocombe has form, having previously been editor of Sleazenation. “I took Sleazenation to be one of the top four style magazines, but it was always going to be fourth on that list,” he says, recognising the strength of competitors i-D, Dazed and Confused and, at the time, The Face. “I could see a new generation with a new sensibility coming up so I thought, rather than be fourth, let’s get on this new thing and be first.”
A sign of what was to come came with Slocombe’s last issue at Sleazenation (May 2003). The publishers were away so he took the opportunity to introduce the freeform approach that Super Super has taken to such troubling extremes. He got the sack and went on to open a shop in Brixton with Namalee, former style editor at Sleazenation. The pair launched a magazine, Super Blow, out of which, 18 months ago, came Super Super.
Slocombe cites Scott King, with whom he worked at Sleazenation, as an influence on his design (particularly in “saying what you have to say efficiently”). However, the approach that King took at the magazine was deemed unsuitable for the new title. “At Sleaze, Scott wanted to do it in a book-ish style, but this new generation doesn’t read books so that’s not a relevant reference for them. This is the ADD generation. You have just one chance, one shot. Every time they open the magazine they have to get it.”
It was a period working for photographer Wolfgang Tillmans that most influenced Slocombe’s approach. A Fine Art graduate from St Martins, Slocombe’s role included helping Tillmans install his shows – a process that was, in itself, an artistic exercise. “We’d get a plan of the space and we’d turn up with work in all kinds of different sizes and respond to the space, arranging the work accordingly: it was an organic process about what work would sit best in certain situations,” he explains.
This, then, is the approach that he brings to designing Super Super. There is no predefined grid: Slocombe starts with the images (which may or may not be in focus) and arranges them so as to maximise the space, just as he and Tillmans would on the gallery wall. There are some rules: copy is set in blocks either 90mm or 40mm wide, at 10 point on 12 point leading or eight on 10, using either Helvetica or Times. But word and image rarely line up: “Things feel a lot more human if they are a fraction out,” Slocombe claims, “it’s about a sense of harmony and rhythm”. It’s what sets Super Super apart: “Magazines had become very machine like, very impersonal. Super Super is very human. It speaks to the reader very directly, removes the barriers. The values of the magazine are to be fun, to be positive, to say ‘have a go, you can do this’.”
While other magazines may seek to manipulate pace by contrasting full-bleed images with more detailed spreads, Super Super tries to cram in as much as possible onto every available inch of space. The reason, according to Slocombe, goes back to its readers’ alarmingly short attention spans. Typically aged between 14 and 24, they cannot be guaranteed to look at more than one spread in any particular issue, he claims, so each one has to embody all the values of the magazine. This, he would have us believe, is a generation with a different aesthetic value system. “In the Wallpaper* era, white was seen as expensive, but the young generation now think that if something has lots of colours, it must be more expensive. That,” he says “sums up the shift quite nicely.”
The magazine is not, Slocombe insists, anti-design. “That whole argument that you have to be either a follower of David Carson or of the Swiss School is not the debate we have now – I’ll take the best of both and anything else that’s around. The old way of things was movement followed by anti-movement, now the culture swallows the past and moves on instead of defining itself against what has gone before,” he argues. “I’m not against what has gone before, I just think this is more appropriate for here and now. At the core of the Swiss ideal is efficient communication – well, this is the most appropriate way to communicate to our audience.”
Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to communicate to them online? Or via their omnipresent mobile phones? “We know about print, Slocombe says, “and it’s much easier to make something feel human in print.”
Slocombe seems amused by the extreme reactions his magazine provokes. “I don’t deliberately set out to shock, I want people to say ‘Wow! It’s great’. It’s not meant to be anti-anything. People think it’s thrown together or anti-design, it really isn’t. It could be done entirely in black and white and it would still be recognisable as Super Super.” And what would that be? “Like nothing and everything you have ever seen before.”
Article from Creative Review
The Provocative Mr Meiré by Patrick Burgoyne (CR)
German art director Mike Meiré (above) is renowned in magazine circles for designing two of the most innovative magazines of recent times – brand eins and Econy. Both were celebrated for their clean, cool aesthetic appeal. His latest project, however, deliberately sets out to subvert all the notions of “good” design that his previous work nurtured so carefully. His redesign of cultural magazine 032c was described by Magculture.com as “willfully awkward”. Set against the standards of mainstream graphic design, it is, well, ugly. Here, Meiré explains why…
The New Ugly by Patrick Burgoyne (CR)
Interview with TwoPointsNet
“Pretty Ugly” is our 13th book as editors. Each book is very different and a great opportunity to learn more about a specific theme. “Pretty Ugly” was an interesting experience because we started with one idea about the movement and ended up with another. The toughest part about doing that book was acctually that there is so much material out there. The first layout, with all the material we received, resulted in over 900 pages and during the selection phase we even encountered more material. It took us weeks to boil down the book to 224 pages.
When we were putting the book together, we were aware of the reflections on the movement by Steven Heller, Michael Bierut (Design Observer) and Patrick Burgoyne (Creative Review). The last two articles cited Mike Meiré’s redesign of 032c (2007), a cultural, german magazine, in which he used stretched Helvetica (now it would probably be Arial) in the headlines, something that was done a lot in the 80s, but forgotten since. This simple gesture shocked designers who thought they’d seen everything. Meiré seemed to have found the last sacrilege in graphic design. Over the years the movement evolved into what we call “Pretty Ugly”.
That the movement isn’t just about aesthetics. Of course, there are obvious aesthetic qualities: intentionally ‘bad’ typography; using system typefaces like Arial, Helvetica or Times; stretching them; having too much or too little letter or line spacing; deforming type on a scanner or a copier, etc. but behind the aesthetics there is more than just visual rebellion. We see a shift in the role the designer plays in the communication process. Design has been seen as the vehicle between sender and receiver. An invisible servant of information. Today, the designer has a voice which has become an important part of the communication process. Often we even see attempts to visualize the design process itself in the work.
You tell us. We might have some works that are pretty ugly. 😉 …, but to be honest we never really try to do anything trendy. In contrary, if something has become a trend we have lost the interest in it. With each project we try to develop an unique visual language based in the character of the product/firma/institution.
Working with uglyness isn’t that interesting, in fact, after doing that book, it is very hard for us to consider something ugly. What is really interesting though is the perception of ugly. In cases of Pretty Ugly it mostly means that something has been created, that society isn’t used to, that it doesn’t understand yet. Something that still has to be “learned”.
As we said earlier, there is too much good material out there. In graphic design you have studios like Superscript2 using amateur photography (p.2) or diagramms that seems to have been taken from PowerPoint (p.29). In photography you have Nacho Alegre, Ana Domínguez and Omar Sosa doing installations with bricks (p.46) or bread (p.56 & p.57), but as well Inês Nepomuceno photographing a still life of an aftermeal situation, making them look like paintings (p.54 & p.55) or Brea Souders intentional “mistakes” in “Seine With Fingers” or “Under My Thumb (Heat)” (p.76). In product design you have Maarten Baas’ “Plastic Chair in Wood” (p.61) and Jerszy Seymour’s “New Order” (p.67) chair, based upon the same cheap plastic chair.
The aesthetics will change, but we hope that some of the attitude will survive. We need more brave designers who are able to think out of the box. Mainly for three reasons: First, responsibility. A designer that sees him or herself as a co-author of the message begins to feel responsible for that message. It was easier to hide yourself behind the client’s messages when the designer was invisible. Second, initiative. Becoming a co-author instills entrepreneurship. Instead of waiting for commissioned work, designers nowadays are taking more initiative and inventing their own products or projects. Lastly, flexibility. A movement that understands design as a process is more flexible. It can more easily adapt, adjust and improve.
Trend Forecaster’s Handbook by Martin Raymond
The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook is a sharp, in-depth and highly visual textbook and teaching aid forstudents and academics keen to know more about the world of trends, trend forecasting, and consumer-insight techniques.
This “how to” book provides design students with skills to understand and track trends and use them to inform their research, design, and product development. With quotes, interviews, and case studies of key players.