Voice memos: I hate Helvetica

I don’t know, do you find it interesting how design evolves most in the places where it’s not so institutionalized? If it sounds obvious, good for you, but from what I've seen and the way I feel strongly about this more than usual, I'd argue maybe nowhere near enough so for everybody else.

Lately, coming home and back, I've been getting unusually excited by ephemera, street side shops, herbal medicine packaging my grandma keeps, things made with Brush Script. Things made by people who are not “trained” in the sense you would usually think. It’s all just localized exchange of culture and ideas. Mostly free of the conventions philosophies celebrities or greats the way the Western world knows it (and mistakenly believed they should, therefore, be true everywhere else). A lot of good arguments by smart people have been made about its link to colonialism and the eurocentrism that followed but for scope’s sake, that’s a topic for another day.

This extends to even the local professionals and studios who have long adopted the Western model and vocabulary of creative work, of brands and strategy and Gestalt principles and crits. (OK let me say I almost said "modernized", then I realized even that carries a really weird connotation now.) I've wondered for a long time why I felt they had a certain charm to them I seldom felt in the places where graphic design was supposedly most advanced, and maybe if I was just racist myself.

But think about it this way. minimalism is considered premium in one culture, and disingenuous and disconnected in another. What happens when you take out of the question, “authorities”, what design “authorities” define as refined or savage? What if you started questioning your own meter of beautiful or ugly, where it came from—who even gets to define it in the first place?

The answer [obligatory 'I think']: design evolves.

There's a tendency, something I think a lot of designers (western especially, double points if they're promoted as 'academic' or 'accomplished' or an inducted member of anything) have yet to grasp. Which is that as far as I’m concerned, we have an obligation as part of this field to keep finding new ways of seeing. You can only stay caged within the prestige or institutions and all the infrastructure built around you for so long before you realize how much you’ve held yourselves back and to some extent, everybody else.

How audacious of a barely 20 girl in pajamas behind a mic who thinks she's so smart to talk down on great people. Oh don't get me started on anti intellectualism! But since none of them are going to hear this anyway, I want to say I'm just trying to sit with an itchy feeling and derive a modus operandi for myself and my own creative practice somehow. I've found it, and if you'd like to steal it: to truly evolve, it's probably a very good idea to try and look in the places you're conditioned not to look.

I don't know I might just be a bit pissed. I happen to be reading Orwell's Notes on Nationalism and think about it every time I feel I'm about to antagonize the "Western world" again here—I feel like if he were alive, writing that essay today and he heard me say all this I would end up in there. We can never be objective, at least I can't be right now, because I wanted to record a conversation I keep having with many people and this itchiness I have that couldn't help but keep growing in me and does so every time I touch my work. But, with everything, I think it always helps to be a little more discerning.

17/2/26