In the Spirit of Bad Design

This essay was written for the 5th edition of the Emerging Art Writers Program, as organized through the Illingworth Kerr Gallery

Here—between rows of helvetica text, underneath flat graphics, and minimalism—lie the weighty bodies of designs that didn't make it past the first draft or weren’t allowed to be conceived. We are ghosts now. Can you feel it? Our ugly contorted presences in the corner of your eye?

As disruptors of peace, ghosts exist in a queer and invisible space. We are not them and are not to empathize with them. In Chinese culture, “ghost” (鬼, Guǐ) is a term that acts as a metaphor for people or things foreign (“us” and the “other”). We are to be weary of how they make themselves known. It's supposedly normal to run from ghosts^{1 and maybe wet our pants and maybe wet our pants} when they come to haunt us. In more serious circumstances, it is normal to eradicate their existence altogether. Their visibility^{2their Phantonomy? Phantom autonomy? I don't know haha} is frightening.

Countless futures become hidden in this process of maintaining modernism cloaked in the contemporary. British cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s concept of Hauntology^{3Here, I reference Mark Fisher's concept of Hauntology, which builds upon Jacques Derrida's term as introduced in his book Specters of Marx. Fisher expands upon Derrida’s concept to address the adoption of cultural plateaus amidst the specters of lost futures.} “meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing” and means that we are haunted by “all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate” (16). All the futures thrown aside hold some inherent form of failure in that they are not presented as the ones we live in now. I can feel this grief for the (supposedly) stupid, counteractive and useless ideas that become nil through this process. In conjunction with Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, my interest is piqued by what it means to be discarded and to become a ghost rather than fearing ghosts in the living world. Halberstam says that losers leave no records, while winners cannot stop talking about it, so the record of failure is "a hidden history of pessimism in a culture of optimism" (qtd. in Sandage 9). What does it mean to be the one to generate ideas and futures that will never happen? I root for the ghost.

Graphic Natures

As graphic design has plateaued to have a small set of approved visual styles and methods of communication, the air grows dense with more and more ghosts. "Form follows function” means that whatever is made, there is one thing to keep in mind: create around how it will be used. In dominating design cultures, it seems that this was the case once before, but no longer. Form stopped following function and started to follow itself (form following form), or it has started following the function of maintaining itself (form following a function that follows form…). These standards inform the ways in which we navigate through our world and decide how to read something semiotically. Language informs living. The current practice of design imagines accessibility as a reinforcement of visual status-quos that “consumers” have already adapted to; if the colour red means violence, love, blood, and passion, then it must be true for all cases. In the past, present, future… everywhere. These cases are passed as inherent, and if the suggestion of something outside of this arises, it becomes uncanny, wrong, or nonsensical—like a person who shares space with us but can no longer be seen.

Does anyone else feel crazy??? In my short few years as a graphic design major before switching to fine arts, I was taught that “good design is invisible,” but when everything deemed “unnecessary” is erased for the sake of decluttering, so are the hands. For every piece of “good” design put out there, a kitten dies.^{4It’s true} The power of determining what is a failure or unsuitable is the same power that casts invisibility onto another, then communities, perspectives, cultures, and histories are dug a grave. Behind every graphic composition draped in this heavy white cloth, a ghost is then born. “Good” design [renders] invisible.

Queer Hauntologies

"In regards to design… I am not interested in outcomes or 'solutions’— that is the rhetoric of genocide. I want untidy endings” (Ian Lynam interviewed by Emily Gosling for Creative Boom)

If to be Haunted is to be followed by the futures that will never happen, maybe a Queer variation of that exists. Queer haunting—to create and imagine irrelevant avenues of being. Halberstam’s Low Theory counters what is regarded as important with the irrelevant; it is “one of these modes of transmission that revels in the detours, twists, and turns through knowing and confusion, and that seeks not to explain but involve" (15). Involving instead of explaining, in this case, looks like catching viewers off guard. There is also an emphasis on sharing these thoughts widely in everyday spaces, “popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant” (21). For the world of graphic design, I imagine this to be negligible, subtle, counterproductive design choices. To kern a few letters too close or far from each other, to move an element 4 pixels off-centre of the grid, to create tangent points in the composition, or destabilize an image by rotating it 2 degrees.

For me, this looks like taking a Chinese font family^{5 Font families encapsulate a larger array of fonts, such as bolded and Italicised fonts} that happens to have Latin characters and punctuation and using it in English. I do this whenever I get the chance; writing a paper, a didactic, or making a graphic for something somewhere. In the uneven spacing between letters and words, and in the monospace-ness of it all, are ghosts who can finally breathe from underneath the anglo language we assume to be more or less universal. The default becomes unsettled.

To many, these ghosts reveal a forgettable archive of badness, messiness, and haunting ugliness. As ghosts ourselves, what we do is a very viable, very very small presence that is happening within our made-invisible communities. They say the spirit of someone finally dies when the last person who remembers them passes. I’m not much worried about that. People don’t talk about all the ghosts who remember hem and will continue to remember when their relevance finally fades from the living world—but we are here.