Weird Is Good

“Taste” is being lauded as the skill (or possession?) that will save artists from the coming deluge of slop. But what does that really mean? I’d argue, it’s some kind of vision outside of the status quo. It’s personal instinct grown from knowledge of what has been and what could be. But instincts and hunches are hard selling points. This kind of mysticism doesn’t fit into a design system built on the premise of a cold, hard logical progression to the inevitable, obvious solution.*

I recently saw a video with musical genius Jacob Collier talking about Ai vs Humans. His point is Ai are effectively prediction machines, so artists must be unpredictable to survive. In his words, “Unpredictability is Freedom.”

We must embrace quirk. It separates us from the aggressive but somnabulatory corporate and from the machines. Not quirk in the sanitized, company-approved pun way or just adding googly eyes. It won’t easily slot into the classic logical structure of the design narrative. But improvisation, taking bets on the strange, these will cut through the cacophony of trend-driven machines chirping at each other.

As one of my favorite design professors would say “Weird is good.” I think this is only truer now.

*This is, of course, not completely true, since graphic design is based on cultural language and associations, which have no hard definitions.