Those of us veteran designers long enough in the tooth to remember the days when our toolkit consisted of the twelve fonts on our first mac, a meagre stack of expensive, flaky Letraset along with scalpels, rapidographs and cow gum do not have an overt nostalgia for the limitations of the trade. While we may long for the more leisurely deadlines such painstaking methods required there was enormous frustration at the sameness enforced by limited means and even more limited print capability.
After the excesses of the last decade, surely a return to authenticity and simplicity was welcome. We of course rejoiced over the regeneration of areas like Capel Street and Stoneybatter and welcomed new food businesses and coffee houses. But what seemed charming and artisan has become ubiquitous. Could your local café with its specially selected home-roasted beans, its metro tiles and exposed filament lightbulbs be equally at home in Shoreditch, Brooklyn or Shanghai? Have we taken craft and simplicity and turned it into an identikit solution that seeks to speak of authenticity and care but could easily be assembled from the same minimal toolkit anywhere?
Before the digital age individual regions and cultures had their own indigenous visual language formed, sometimes artlessly by local craftsmen reflecting the limitations of the media in which they worked. Advertisements and labels achieved a balance and craft due to the restrictions of the hot metal and hand lettering available to them. The resulting visual culture was rich and resonant and reflected not just the locale but also the social mores of the times.
Alas this has been mined and appropriated to create the nostalgic, craft effect of hipster culture with its obsession with commandeering the past to add a patina and veneer to a world that is in reality technology driven and highly connected.
In the fast moving world of consumer packaging, trends have become increasingly globalized with little concern for local flavour or the tastes unique to each region. At the mass-market level this has manifested in a current trend for packs that are rustic and artisan in tone. While many of these designs have charm individually, their rustic naiveté has become ubiquitous and is now the preserve of private label rather than just the artisan products that inspired it. On the other hand a purer, contemporary aesthetic works very well for premium and niche products but will not have the aggression or shelf-impact needed to compete in the mass market. Surely then a return to a purer, pared-back, crafted aesthetic is welcome. It is in many ways, because it should allow products and brands to have individual quirks and tell stories that are rooted in authenticity, heritage and provenance. Unfortunately what has happened is that the work of a few design pioneers has had its aesthetic harvested and applied across a plethora of brands and products. There is now such a condensed visual language that one can purchase predesigned brand-marks and pack designs from stock libraries or neat packages of typefaces that will instantly evoke an “authentic”, “crafted” and “individual” tone.
In packaging design this results in a simple suite of typefaces including Futura Bold, the ubiquitous Brothers alongside a limited number of scripts being used over and over again to create what has become a uniform aesthetic. Fake period style iconography is created and is almost always shown in monochrome silhouette framed by simple geometric shapes. It is as if the designers of our digital age are working within the limitations of days gone by. Does this really evoke authenticity? Are consumers so easily lulled by such an easily reproduced aesthetic?
It makes perfect sense for a period product such as the lovely yellow Campbell’s Tea can to remain locked in the era in which it first appeared. It has a genuine heritage and its unchanging look with its rusticated graphics worn down by bromide after bromide speaks volumes of its authenticity and provenance. When refreshing an iconic Irish brand such as Paddy Irish Whiskey, why lovingly recreate and refine genuine elements such as the Paddy Flaherty signature and the four provinces map of Ireland only to replace the brand’s authentic mid-century typography with the ubiquitous Brothers? It must now surely share this typeface with a myriad of craft beers and indeed other whiskeys.
Surely there must be a contemporary expression of craft and provenance that does not need to mine the past for inspiration. We are losing all sense of the local flavour and colour that was intrinsic to the type of work that is being pastiched. There needs to be a return to a genuine authenticity rooted in the present unencumbered by a bag of visual tricks from a era it does not belong in. We need to strive for visual languages that are less homogenized and can be rooted in real places and real stories. If we don’t achieve this, history will judge this decade as having no new ideas and no visual language of its own.
Originally published in Marketing.ie November 2016
Author: Rory Dowling
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