The aesthetics of careless design
I realized today that my idea of what looks "unfinished" or "lazy"1 in design is changing. I don't know if these are the right words, but hopefully what I mean will be clear as this post goes on.
There are just some aesthetics that look unfinished lazy for contextual reasons. For example, in video games, the default design options always look unfinished to me, because they're what you get when you don't change anything.
I want to be clear, though, that me calling something "unfinished" in this case is a cultural observation rather than a personal-values one. I mean, critics said that Olympia looked unfinished back in the day. Also see: a gigantic chunk of modern art since then.
Enough exposition...
Basically, things that previously might have looked very polished now look lazy/unfinished to me because of AI image generation. When an image seems like a corporation indiscriminately ate everything that's currently popular and shat out a collectively-dreamt advertisement, it just looks to me like something made in five seconds, and I tune out.2
I have complicated feelings about AI, which I want to write another post about later. I actually was really excited about the artistic potential of LLM's pretty early on, and I almost feel betrayed now that they're seemingly primarily used by people who already have time and money to sell more stuff to those who don't.
Anyway, the context of art and design is changing is my point. Is this good? Bad? I don't know. It kind of just is, and I thought it was an interesting observation. Maybe we'll have a new renaissance of sloppy and ugly3 aesthetics, which I, personally, welcome.
I have a lot of feelings about things being called "lazy" that I don't feel like addressing at the moment. Just know that I'm not trying to make a value judgement on individuals based on the amount of time they can or can't provide to a particular project. I'm just using this word because I don't know what other word to use right now.↩
Although I tune out of most things once I realize they're an ad, but still.↩
Been thinking a lot about the idea of ugliness lately thanks to this video. And thanks to the aforementioned aggressively beautiful aesthetics of AI, I think that embracing ugliness in art can be just as revolutionary as embracing ugliness in people. If you don't feel like watching an hour and a half long video, though, see reclaimugly.org.↩