Cult of the ugly

Beauty

Ask a toad what is beauty… He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.¹

Ask Paul Rand what is beauty and he will answer that the separation of form and function, of concept and execution, is not likely to produce objects of aesthetic value.²

Then ask the same question of the Cranbrook Academy of Art students who created the ad hoc desktop publication Output (1992), and to judge by the evidence they might answer that beauty is chaos born of found letters layered on top of random patterns and shapes.

Those who value functional simplicity would argue that the Cranbrook students’ publication, like a toad’s warts, is ugly. The difference is that unlike the toad, the Cranbrook students have deliberately given themselves the warts.

Output

Output is eight unbound pages of blips, type fragments, random words and other graphic minutiae purposefully given the serendipitous look of a printer’s make-ready.

The lack of any explanatory précis (and only this end note: ‘Upcoming Issues From: School of the Art Institute of Chicago [and] University of Texas’) leaves the reader confused as to its purpose or meaning, though its form leads one to presume that it is intended as a design manifesto, another ‘experiment’ in the current plethora of aesthetically questionable graphic output.

Given the increase in graduate school programmes which provide both a laboratory setting and freedom from professional responsibility, the word experiment has come to justify a multitude of sins.

The value of design experiments should not of course be measured only by what succeeds, since failures are often steps towards new discoveries.

Value

Experimentation is the engine of progress, its fuel a mixture of instinct, intelligence and discipline. But the engine floods when too much instinct and not enough intelligence or discipline is injected into the mix.

This is the case with certain of the graphic design experiments that have emanated from graduate schools in the US and Europe in recent years – work driven by instinct and obscured by theory, with ugliness its foremost by-product.

How is ugly to be defined in the current postmodern design climate where existing systems are up for re-evaluation, order is under attack and the forced collision of disparate forms is the rule? For the moment, let us say that ugly decision, as opposed to classical design (where adherence to the golden mean and a preference for balance and harmony serve as the foundation for even the most unconventional compositions) is the layering of unharmonious graphic forms in a way that results in confusing messages.

By this definition, Output could be considered a prime example of ugliness in the service of fashionable experimentation. Though not intended to function in the commercial world, it was distributed to thousands of practising designers on the American Institute of Graphic Arts and American Center for Design mailing lists, so rather than remain cloistered and protected from criticism as on-campus ‘research’, it is a fair subject for scrutiny. It can legitimately be described as representing the current cult of ugliness.

Rebellion

The layered images, vernacular hybrids, low-resolution reproductions and cacophonous blends of different types and letters at once challenge prevailing aesthetic beliefs and propose alternative paradigms. Like the output of communications rebels of the past (whether 1920s Futurists or 1960s psychedelic artists), this work demands that the viewer or reader accept non-traditional formats which at best guide the eye for a specific purpose through a range of non-linear ‘pathways’, and at worst result in confusion.

But the reasons behind this wave are dubious. Does the current social and cultural condition involve the kind of upheaval to which critical ugliness is a time-honoured companion? Or in the wake of earlier, more serious experimentation, has ugliness simply been assimilated into popular culture and become a stylish conceit?

Ugly design can be a conscious attempt to create and define alternative standards. Like warpaint, the dissonant styles which many contemporary designers have applied to their visual communications are meant to shock an enemy – complacency – as well as to encourage new reading and viewing patterns. The work of American designer Art Chantry combines the shock-and-educate approach with a concern for appropriateness.

For over a decade Chantry has been creating eye-catching, low-budget graphics for the Seattle punk scene by using found commercial artefacts from industrial merchandise catalogues as key elements in his posters and flyers. While these ‘unsophisticated’ graphics may be horrifying to designers who prefer Shaker functionalism to punk vernacularism, Chantry’s design is decidedly functional within its context. Chantry’s clever manipulations of found ‘art’ into accessible, though unconventional, compositions prove that using ostensibly ugly forms can result in good design.

Truth

John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but in contemporary design, no single standard of beauty — or ugliness — holds authority.

Ugliness is valid, even refreshing, when it is key to an indigenous language representing alternative ideas and cultures. The problem with the cult of ugly graphic design emanating from the major design academies and their alumni is that it has so quickly become a style that appeals to anyone without the intelligence, discipline or good sense to make something more interesting out of it.

While the proponents are following their various muses, their followers are misusing their signature designs and typography as style without substance. Ugliness as a tool, a weapon, even as a code is not a problem when it is a result of form following function. But ugliness as its own virtue – or as a knee-jerk reaction to the status quo – diminishes all design.