Cult of the Ugly

"Cult of the Ugly" by Steven Heller (1990) http://www.typotheque.com/site/articles.php?&id=68

Moderators:

• Fako Berkers

It was quite hard to follow everything and writing about it at the same time. I also missed my partner to complete and correct me, so the transcription will probably be far from perfect …

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• Modern vs postmodern design
• Design norms
• Harmony
• Hyves vs Facebook
• GIF
• Template vs customization

Summary of key points raised in the text:

First Heller states that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. We might find that warts are not attractive, but toads do.

Then Heller continuous by pointing out that the idea of beauty has changed in the transition between modernism and post-modernism. In post-modernism the idea that you want to express becomes more important then the aesthetics of the end result. If it is the concept to go against certain aesthetics and what they represent, then it suddenly becomes interesting to be ugly.

So ugliness can be interesting, but Heller goes on by remarking that ugliness has become a new norm, without having an interesting concept behind it and he opposes this kind of ugliness, because nothing is given back from giving up aesthetics.

Discussion Notes & Afterthoughts:

We started to talk about aesthetics and it is said that geography is an important aspect of it. Also what feeling a work imposes is important in your notion of what is aesthetic.

Then Olia brings in the notion of clarity in a message that makes things aesthetics by giving a quote that I could not find in the text so fast. This view was thought to be problematic, because the classical way of designing might suffer from the same flaws.

Rennee points out that the text was written at a time that a lot of designers are afraid of losing their jobs and have a pessimistic view on the future.

Olia then wants to talk about Hyves as an example. We conclude that Hyves is unharmonious and the way the template is set up is bound to fail. It is noted that the design of templates is something which is not considered in the texts of today, because they were written before templates existed. We then compare the Facebook template with Hyves and conclude that it is much more harmonious and more clear, but not more user friendly.

We then change to argue about GIF's and especially blinking GIF's. The blinking GIF's are made by tools purely made for decoration. It is noted that the issue is decoration vs design and that the design is done by the template builders. Not everybody agrees, saying that making skins is not designing.

We have a look at http://webflair-archive.com to compare different design idioms that have been in use since the beginning of the internet. There's also a prediction about the future and most in class hate the idea that such design will be the future.

In fact the entire idea of templates is discarded saying that form should follow content, which is almost never the case if you apply a template. A template offers convenience, but customizing is a better way of designing in the eyes of most people present.

Fako

I think it is naief to say that templates are not designed. It remains a question which messages different templates give. To compare Hyves and Facebook in this way seems a missed opportunity.