Thoughts on "Designing Our Own Graves"

This article at Design Observer combines a nostalgic mourning for the lost art of album covers with a nearly futuristic spin on prosumerism / the "Make generation" / the "MySpace generation" / the "Pimp My Ride generation" - whatever you want to call it.

This shift in emphasis has the potential to marginalize designers. Take book covers. The rich tradition of cover design has developed because publishers have believed that a cover could help sell more books. But now more and more people are buying books based on peer reviews, user recommendations, and rankings. Word of mouth has always been a powerful marketing force, but now those mouths have access to sophisticated networks on which their words can spread faster than ever before. Covers are seen at 72dpi at best. The future of the medium depends on how it is integrated into the process of social production. The budget that once went to design fees is already being redirected to manipulating search criteria and influencing Google rankings. A good book cover can still help sell books but it is up against a lot more competition for the marketing dollar.

Prosumerism is also changing the role of graphic design in the music industry. When the music industry made the shift to compact discs in the late 1980s, many designers complained that the smaller format would be the death of album art. Fifteen years later those predictions seem almost quaint. The mp3 format makes compact disc packaging seem like the broad side of a barn... The cover art for the new album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was the result of a do-it-yourself flag project the band ran online. The public image of a musician or band is no longer defined by an artfully staged photo or eye-popping album art. A filename that fits nicely into the "listening to" field in the MySpace template might be more important. The mp3 format and the ubiquity of downloading has shrunk the album art canvas to a 200x200 pixel jpg.

I'm not exactly an optimistic guy myself, but this strikes me as wallowing.

For contrast, this is a brilliant article by an artist/designer/creative-type for the card game Magic: the Gathering about the challenges and opportunities in making art for a 2" × 1.5" box:

As if overcoming the size of the Little Box was not enough, Magic art also needs to overcome the reason why it is small. It is small because Magic cards are meant to be used in groups of many, whether in play on a table, in binders, or tall stacks. In order to be recognized among scads of others, many Magic illustrations use a grabber to get your attention right now. "Thing" is the word I use to describe this grabber. It's the angle an artist takes on a particular piece that may be recognized without close inspection of the card. Examples of "things" are bold color, intricate pattern, unique viewpoint, in-your-face action, unique color choices, etc. This gives a Magic card, (a wizard, for example) a chance to immediately distinguish itself from other wizard cards.

The two articles seem almost diametrically opposed on this point - is small, grainy pixelated art bad (Design Observer) or good (Magic)?

I suppose I'm biased (I own more Magic cards than LPs, for one thing), but I find presentations like this just as impressive as any life-size art.

Permalink • Posted in: design, gaming, words • Comments (2)