Perceived Value

Ok confession: I’m no economist or marxist historian, so I’m just muddling and rambling my way through this idea. If you have any recommended readings, additions, or critiques, please send them my way!

Here we go:

How we design something creates a perception of value, right? I can all-caps a word in a san-serif, track it out a bit, and it communicates more luxury and elegance (Just look at what every fashion house has done.). It’s a similar thing with a script and a bunch of flourishes or a tracked-in, condensed serif font. Contrast this with something that is made to look more homespun with paint texture, primary colors, rounded, “friendly” lettering.

It’s a similar deal with the language of mid-century/Swiss design. Besides designers’ unceasing worship of minimalism, why is this? Why does this style still operate as a short-hand for “valuable?”

I’d argue (as the brilliant Art Chantry argued, thanks for reminding me, Stefan), that in part, it is due to perceived effort. Back in the 50s and 60s, it required real effort and precision to draw out geometric shapes, to achieve perfect symmetry, to lay out a grid and execute type against it. Having slick, smooth, geometric design signified real craft and labor, so it communicated value in itself.

BUT NOW, slick, smooth, geometric design is the default. Open any design program, and everything snaps into place. One doesn’t need to practice or go to design school to achieve it. Perfect circles require two button-clicks. Symmetry is the same. While we can argue about aesthetic beauty through perfect curves and symmetry, it no longer communicates “value” in quite the same way as it had. One need only look at stock sites and social media for loads of examples of geometrically perfect, cheap, uninspiring work.

These days, getting out your pencils and pastels requires real effort. Achieving texture in the real world requires tearing yourself away from a screen and using up actual, honest-to-goodness resources like paint and paper. The touch of the human hand, human gesture, these communicate real labor done in service of the idea. So the end product has more perceived labor value.

And in this time of rapid-prompting, as images and visuals grow cheaper by the second, I’d wager that gesture, that visual process, will only grow more valuable.