today i very much enjoyed reading this interview with pentragram’s dj stout. on the heels of paula scher telling pr*ttysh*tty she thinks graphic design is kind of going to hell in a hand basket (“Mostly, I feel like I am witnessing the total abandonment of graphic design. It’s as if the whole industry is yelling out we’re poor, we’re scared and we’re stupid.”), dj stout shares a similar view: “There’s still a lot of horrible design out there. I can’t believe how much bad design there is actually.”

is this just pentagram arrogance talking? i don’t think so. read a little further into the interviews and you’ll see both ms. scher and mr. stout are concerned about trendiness and surface design. you know, people making design decisions based solely on what they see others doing.

here is mr. stout on the whole grunge/crazy type/visual cacophony design style originated by david carson.

… when [Carson] came up with that original look that he came up with the solution to a problem… he was working at a magazine where he didn’t have a very good art budget, so he was given all these crummy photographs. He was like, well I’m not going to sit here and do bad design, I’m going to sit here and do something with my intelligence and come up with something more interesting. He’d take a photo and crop it in an interesting way. And then he started doing stuff with typography because those were the tools that he had.

… There’s this whole period where there were all these David Carson imitators, but they were all these young kids going after a particular look. They had no idea why they were doing it. They were just copying what everyone was doing at the time. There was some really bad design around that period because there were all these young designers that were just imitating, but they weren’t doing it in an intelligent way.

i agree. design without intelligence, without forethought, without purpose… that’s just bad design. i simply don’t see the point of being on trend if it doesn’t suit the challenge at hand. graphic design is not art; it’s not fashion. it’s a communication tool.