notes.husk.org/likes images.

It’s difficult for me to read this blog post now, 2.5 years later. Because even though I’ve changed, and even though I did set out, at that point, to explore those questions, they haven’t gone away. How does one produce meaningful work when there’s so much waste? I continue to struggle with this, big time. And I’m curious who else does. How do we, as an industry of creative professionals, reconcile the fact that so much of what we make is used to perpetuate the demands of a bloated marketplace? A monoculture?

These questions aren’t just for designers. I know that.

At some point when I was driving in Southern California, I decided to dictate every message that I saw into my phone, and I made this list. 78 messages. 

We could say that this is lowest-common-denominator branding. Cheap marketing aimed at an audience with very little attention to spare, driving on polluted, crowded freeways. 

Sort of like spam, I guess. I had an extreme reaction, but it was an honest one. Because the brand guidelines that I was being paid to create were supposed to be better than this, but what I really suspected, honestly, was that they weren’t.