Vernacular Design

We're Here to be Bad


- Designers should be bad, not in visual style, but in terms of client cooperation.
- Design is required to distinguish the brand, rather than the actual quality of the product at hand.
- With big-time companies now competing globally, marketing has led design to "sell out," rather than improve the product to viewer relationship.
- Appropriate design, in terms of creating what is most promotable rather than supplying tasteful craftsmanship, is minimizing the boundaries of the design field.
- With design that may be considered risky, the grounds for good design can be reinvented when still compromising with a client.

Professionalism, Amateurism, and the Boundaries of Design


- The details of professionalism versus amateurism are only distinct in terms of their given learning instead of the work produced or talent exhibited.
- The DIY designer, as opposed to the employed professional, is able to cross boundaries and break rules, which may lead to innovative and praised work, whereas the professional is limited to the client's standards and desires.
- The popularity and implication of digital design programs broadened the field for design practitioners, and therefore, expanded the worth of credibility and exaltation.
- Vernacular design, or universal design, has some notable examples while, due to its high-spread tendencies, bad examples exist as well, if not more often.
- Design done locally, expressing the values and emotions of those who would be considered users, had special qualities that would be labeled with greatness, whereas the uniform corporate design included less of the instinctive qualities and more of the unfriendly, formal ones.

These two articles seemed to express the same notion of great design through non-conformity. Although written with different discipline and lengthiness, they have the same rebellious attitude that I believe to be necessary for the reinvention of standard impressiveness. We're here to be Bad expressed more of the "fuck the client" ideology, preaching a non-compromsing mentality in order to pursue great visual appeal as well as viewer supported content. Professionalism, Amateurism and Boundaries had more DIY promotion, however both focused on the ideals of being a professional, mentioning that being considered professional does not mean you are creating above average design, but in most cases lending more to what would be considered average even to the audience. I do believe, however that by being a professional and succumbing to the vernacular design is not bad, it is not what one does, but how one does things. Obviously, in graphic design, for instance, there is necessary content that one needs to include if working for a client, but when including the essential information to a viewer-intended graphic, there is room for divergence. There is place to stray politely, yet creatively enough that the image and text can be perceived as tasteful rather than redundant. There is an interesting connection between the supposed miraculous quality of a talented DIY-er and those who, as mentioned in "Bad," have portfolios that resemble their professors, and the professors who resemble their professors. It seems the instinctive intuition that had been commended in "Professionalism" will lead to the evolution of design, not the diligent student who finds safety in stopping at the boundaries.