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For Love of God, Make Your Own Website - Aftermath

The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now I usually end up at the same three or four websites.

“Building our own websites, making independent media, and striving for more democratic social networks—I think these are some of the small but crucial things we need to be doing to create alternatives to the monopolistic, billionaire-owned and increasingly authoritarian tech ecosystems currently dominating our lives,” Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, told me. “We still have to figure out how to triumph over extractive tech companies and curtail aggressively toxic social networks that encourage the spread of hateful messages, and to fund and elevate alternatives not in thrall to tech billionaires, but building working models is a necessary and urgent first step.”

#article #internet #web design #website #social media

thoughtportal reblogged

rapidpunches

leninthesixth

folks you need to understand that the eradication of trained artists and designers is a much, much, much bigger threat to arts and culture than IP laws.

leninthesixth

why do you think is it that every movie poster the same collage of a bunch of faces? why does every website made after 2015 look the same and rendered unusable by the same ugly pop ups? why does it keep getting harder to differentiate the apps on your phone? Why can't the back of the book just fucking tell you what the book is about?

look I'm a graphic designer. when I started studying design I had clear career goals. I spent like, thousands of hours on studying effective visual communication, psychology, history, grid systems, color theory, typography, print and digital design techniques, accessibility like whatever I believed would make me better at design I poured myself into it.

and within the span of like. five years maybe. 90% of design work disappeared. By the time I graduated there were basically no graphic designers. After 2012 Every company decided that design itself is trivial and true designers should know how to code. And manage social media. And do video editing. And copywrite. and this. and that. and. and. and. and as previous generations of visual designers and illustrators retired, the people who had the luxury of putting all their time into developing specific set of skills, they were replaced with tech grifters and designers who were forced to learn a dozen different skills and were at best mediocre at everything.

my job is not threatened by AI automation because it has already been ruined by automation through canva and bootstrap. and no one even tried to put a stop to it because good design is hard to understand and easy to imitate. so people started to imitate the visuals of previous good design and thought that was all there is to design. and after 10 years of copies of copies of copies we're all asking each other: "why does everything look the same"

now illustrators fear the same will happen to their field. and some of them want stricter copyright laws rights, because there is nothing else that can protect their work. "theft" is the only legal protection they have. and yeah, IP laws suck. but it's better for them to defend their labor using shoddy laws than not at all. and if you allow unimaginative grifters to displace artists from the few creative fields where they still work you won't even have a reason to worry about IP laws.

thoughtportal

Our Obsession With Less and Its Co-option by Silicon Valley

Kyle Chayka’s new book, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, probes the corporate world’s love of minimalist design and what it might mean.

hyperallergic.com|Hrag Vartanian

In this episode for Sunday Edition, we welcome Kyle Chayka to examine Silicon Valley’s taste for minimalist design. Is this just the latest development for a style that has a long history but only emerged into pop culture during the 1960s and ‘70s when a contemporary art movement emerged to propel the taste for less into a global phenomenon?

Chayka’s book, (Bloomsbury, 2020), is a highly readable book that examines the historical precedents of minimalist design, its incarnation as contemporary art, and how it was co-opted by architecture, design, and fashion companies to represent a new, generic sense of luxury. I also want to mention that the author should be no stranger to longtime Hyperallergic readers.

The music for this episode is Darkstar’s “Timeaway,” which is taken from the new album News From Nowhere, courtesy of Warp Records (warp.net/artists/darkstar>)

#podcast #Silicon Valley #minimalism #podcasts #art podcast #art history #art #product design #web design #graphic design #home design #design #cultural critique #Society and Culture #cultural criticism #Kyle Chayka

thoughtportal

Wait Wait...Tell Me! - 99% Invisible

99percentinvisible.org

Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out that design can completely change whether a five minute wait feels reasonable or completely unbearable. The city of Detroit eventually tried to design a solution for the residents waiting on a demolition, and to do that they turned to a body of research that offered insights into the strange psychology of waiting. The research didn’t come from studying city government; it came from studying the particular frustration that people feel when they’re waiting for a computer to load.

#detroit #waiting #design #web design #database #computers #tech #technology #99 percent invisible #podcast #psychology #science #city planning