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.

Creative Review

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

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…

CR: Did you deliberately set out to break rules with the redesign of 032c? Is it a provocation?

Mike Meiré: Why? Just because it looks different? Or because we stopped following the aesthetical path of the former issues, so people feel disappointed because we haven’t fulfilled their expectations? Making a magazine is about taking a decision, either you do it because you believe in your vision or you follow a market.

032c is a very strong independent magazine with highly sophisticated content, but it became visually predictable. Generally, that’s not a big concern, but for a contemporary culture magazine which appears only two times a year it is.

When I met Jörg Koch, the editor-in-chief, it was quite clear from the beginning that he wanted to change the whole thing. He was talking about energy and experimentation, a radical step towards brutality. The meeting took place in my factory in Cologne where I moved my company two years ago – to be independent again, to free myself, to step aside from these everyday commercial expectations. So our profiles were matching immediately!

 


Meiré previously designed German business titles brand eins and Econy

There are so many magazines out there which pretend to be cool, sophisticated or even culturally relevant. They all look the same, more or less. (…oouh! I know! There are a few good magazines out there! But I am talking about the rest, the 99.9%!) They all play this stylish “classy” Feuilleton-inspired design game. In 1999 I designed the first issue of German economy magazine brand eins (Which is based on the rebirth of beauty. Classic typography combined with white pages and remarkable photography.) which became quietly iconic and got copied a lot. So I know what I am talking about. Since then I am looking for an alternative graphic design wave in Germany … but it hasn’t happened so far. So I used my chance with 032c to come up with something different. But this was only possible because of the incredible quality 032c stands for.

In fact the new issue is exactly worked around the essence of 032c. Remember their first issue; bold, rough, intellectual, black and white, on the cover a huge square in pantone 032c? For the redesign I just went back to their roots, put the square back on the cover with Cecilia (the curvy girl in a black rubber cat suit) inside and the PANTONE 032c Red around it. Very simple, very strong. Feels like a subversive version of Germany’s number one politics magazine Der Spiegel.
Of course the stretched typography makes you look twice. Like an accident in our eye candy lifestyle magazine world. ERROR. I am always interested in the concept of evolution = harmony/break/harmony …

Making a magazine is finding out the right look for its content, its attitude. And 032c has its own ways to combine different stories ranges from war-photography, fashion, art, architecture, politics, etc. To me it’s the only way to create a unique identity, if you don’t want to be “me too”. Maybe you don’t please the common sense anymore – but you become who you are, authentic in your own way.

So coming back to your question. YES, I did deliberately set out to break rules with this and YES, it is a provocation – but in the first place to myself! I remember a quote from the German artist Martin Kippenberger I have published in my own magazine AD2G 1990 “Es gibt nur den Dreck und die Schönheit im Dreck” (There is only dirt and the beauty within) … if every magazine or every building or every brand or everybody tries to look appealing somehow in the same idea of being modern, it becomes interesting to go the opposite. Because life has different kinds of beauty to present.

CR: Were you influenced by anything specific?


MM: I remembered a few things I made before the “APPLE Age”. All done with the great help of a copy machine. Some early artist catalogues and a small art newspaper. But for the 032c everything really started with a very small stretched copy next to a picture. It was somehow strangely beautiful. A bit dark but very refreshing. It needed to be balanced because I didn’t want to go retro.

CR: Is the headline type stretched or did you have a special typeface drawn like that?


MM: This was actually the hardest job to get right. Most of the time my assistant Tim Giesen was stretching types like hell. The idea was getting us into a kind of “darker”. We combined the stretched ones with types from the Helvetica and Futura family and the Times New Roman Condensed. We had to recondition our minds aesthetically wise while we were working on 032c. After some days everything commercial looked so boring… unbelievable! It was a bit like a trip.
I wanted to reveal a darker beauty which embraces mature elegance and coolness. When the layouts were done we sent them to Jörg, based in Berlin, he replied with his one-word-code: “KILLER!”

CR: Is it anti-design?


MM: It is what it is. Isn’t it? If you call it anti-design, that’s fine with me. I think being anti is important these days. Sometimes there is a real need to say NO. There is so much stuff around us …
As I already said I became a bit tired of all these look-a-like magazines. They’re all made very professional – but I was looking for something more charismatic. I wanted to search for an interesting look beyond the mainstream. Maybe something more “brutal” as Jörg used to say. We wanted a truthful intelligent independent magazine with a touch of underground.

I think we did it. And people may feel this and that’s why they are a bit confused because we all are used to this kind of efficient-streamlined-whatever-correctness…

Article from Creative Review

The New Ugly by Patrick Burgoyne (CR)

Following all the debate generated by our interviews with Super Super’s Steve Slocombe and 032c art director Mike Meiré, here is the piece from the current issue of Creative Review which draws on those sources to set the work into a wider context.

Stretched type, day-glo colours and a flagrant disregard for the rules: are we witnessing a knee-jerk reaction to the slick sameness of so much design or a genuine cultural shift?

In the early 90s, the mother of all rows blew up between, on the one hand, the traditionalist school of American designers led by Massimo Vignelli and, in defiant opposition, the avant garde of Emigre and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The catalyst was an essay in Eye magazine by Steven Heller entitled Cult of the Ugly, in which the world’s most prolific design writer took Cranbrook and its students to task over, as he saw it, their gratuitously ugly output. Well now, it seems, ugly is back.

Exhibit A: Wolff Olins’ 2012 Olympics logo. When finally wheeled out to confront an ever-more-hostile national press, 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 addition, Wolff Olins’ chairman Brian Boylan claimed success for having “created something original in a world where it is increasingly difficult to make something different”. In other words, when we are surrounded by logos created to a slick, if mediocre, aesthetic standard, the only way to stand out is deliberately to reject those standards.

Which brings us to Exhibit B: the magazine that seemingly influenced Wolff Olins’ thinking – style magazine and New Rave progenitor, Super Super. Launched early last year, its art direction has been likened to “a clown being sick”. Its 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 its creative director, Steve Slocombe, what underlines the magazine 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.. His last issue there (May 2003 which, incidentally, got him the sack) introduced the freeform approach that Super Super has taken to such troubling extremes. But, he says, it was a period working for photographer Wolfgang Tillmans that most influenced his 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 aboutwhat 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, is that its readers (typically aged between 14 and 24) are part of the “ADD Generation”. Their alarmingly short attention spans mean that 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. And, he says, they have a completely different idea about colour. If you are 30-plus, white may embody sophistication and expense, but to the Super Super “reader” it is colour that does this – bright colours and lots of them.

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 may have 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.”

The charitable view would be that Slocombe’s lack of formal design training has left him unencumbered by the profession’s history and therefore more able to seek out new forms of expression: the uncharitable view would be that Super Super is simply a mess, created for young kids who will move on to more sophisticated tastes as they mature. And yet the magazine’s core concerns – of seeking to inject some quirky humanity into a slickly homogenised magazine market, of being true to a vision deemed appropriate to the readership – are shared by a designer with a far more “establishment” pedigree. Which brings us to Exhibit C: Mike Meiré’s recent redesign of German cultural magazine 032c.

Meiré is renowned in magazine circles for his art direction of Brand Eins, a German business magazine that mixed beautiful photography with classic typography and lots of white space. That was in 1999: since then, Meiré says he’s been waiting for an alternative approach to emerge, but to no avail. “There are so many magazines out there which pretend to be cool, sophisticated or even culturally relevant. They all look the same,” he says. “I became a bit tired of all these look-a-like magazines,” which, through Brand Eins, he helped create. “They’re all made very professionally but I was looking for something more charismatic. I wanted to search for an interesting look that was beyond the mainstream.”

The result is a magazine that, wrote designer Jeremy Leslie on his blog MagCulture, “uses typography and layouts that are hard to describe as anything but ugly. The pages feel thrown together. When I expressed my confusion about the redesign to the magazine’s founder/editor Joerg Koch,” continued Leslie, “I received a surprising reply. ‘Thanks for your message which made me incredibly happy! This is exactly what we wanted to achieve, this sort of engagement with a magazine where you question yourself if it makes sense, if it is really brilliant or simply daft.’”

Meiré readily admits that “Yes, I did deliberately set out to break rules with this and yes, it is a provocation – but in the first place to myself! If every magazine or every building or every brand or everybody tries to look appealing by using the same idea of being modern, it becomes interesting to go in the opposite direction, because life has different kinds of beauty to present. If people feel confused by it, it is because we are all so used to this kind of efficient, streamlined, correctness.”

In his original essay, Heller slammed those using ugliness as a knee-jerk reaction to the status quo. “Ugliness as its own virtue diminishes all design,” he said. All three projects cited here could be accused of such a crime. However, Heller also argued that ugliness “is not a problem when it is a result of form following function”. Though none of Wolff Olins, Slocombe or Meiré may feel comfortable with describing their work as ugly, they all lay claim to their pursuit of the latter.

“Making a magazine is about finding the right look for its content, its attitude,” Meiré argues. “To me it’s the only way to create a unique identity. [In doing so] maybe you don’t please the [mainstream] anymore – but you become who you are, authentic in your own way.”

This, it would seem, is the crux of the matter. If all three of these projects, and other contemporary works in the same vein, are merely an attempt to zig while the world zags, to be different for difference’s sake, then they need not detain us for long. If, however, they are the honest result of form following function and thereby represent the visual expression of a genuine cultural shift, then that becomes something altogether more interesting.

Take colour, for instance. Both the Olympics logo and Super Super propose a new relationship between colour and quality. That bright no longer necessarily equals trashy. That a younger generation is inverting the chromatic scale as it relates to notions of quality and class. Super Super claims to address the impact of changing patterns of media consumption on design. This, it says, is what happens when your “readers” are not readers at all but mere “scanners” of content who are as likely to start at page 46 as page one. And all three claim to be fired by a desire to involve their audiences rather than simply presenting themselves to them. Inevitably this would seem to require a move away from the slick and the forbidding, toward, as Slocombe describes it, something more “human”.

There is more than empty styling at work here. Something like Super Super can easily be dimissed as just a few kids messing about, but, as a recent piece on New Rave in The Sunday Times Style magazine noted, that’s pretty much how all trends start. All three projects are well-intentioned attempts to respond to and engage with a shifting cultural landscape. If this is the future, it may not be a pretty sight.