Pretty Ugly

Visual Rebellion in Design
Gestalten

Unconventional = Ugly

“It is a new kind of beauty that isn’t based upon pure visual pleasure, it is a beauty based upon context-driven design, being transparent with working methods, tools and materials,” claim the book’s editors, Martin Lorenz and Lupi Asensio of Barcelona design studio TwoPoints.Net, who came up with the Pretty Ugly term to describe the ‘movement.

Deviant - 'Against established criteria of what good design is. Embracing what is disliked and considered incorrect. Mistakes become virtues, create authenticity and humanity.

Mundane - 'Converting ordinary into extra-ordinary, old into new. Elevating ugliness to a new kind of beauty by changing its function or message. The mundane attracts the attention of those who find perfection boring.'

Impure - 'Unpredictable textures, intentional randomness and seemingly un-composed works. Simple structures compositions turn into complex surfaces allowing for more than a single perception.'

Mishmash - 'Interlaced images establish new meanings and spaces. Multi-layered graphics reveal their process of creation, displaying a before and after. Within a signle piece, several stories are visualised simultaneously.'

Deformed - 'Distorting forms of well-known shapes with digital and analog tools. Tearing them apart until they become nearly illegible and lose their original function. Yet illegibility is not the goal, the deformation is often an escape from the unaltered, impersonal. It is an attempt to create a unique piece of work'.

Neo-artisanal - 'Why distinguish between digital and analogue tools? They become self-evident neither of them need to be proven right or wrong, better or worse. Digital and analog are interwoven and dominating both fields is a necessity for contemporary craft.'

Rob Van Den Nieuwenhuizen
P.188


https://www.creativereview.co.uk/pretty-ugly-or-plain-ugly/

Geographically, most of the work featured hails from Belgium, France, Germany and The Netherlands. The latter gives a clue as to the work’s intellectual origins too. Lorenz and Asensio say “We would guess that many of the seeds of the Pretty Ugly were sown in the Netherlands around 2000.

Perhaps the origins of the work also have something to do with the fact that these countries provide the support for young designers to be experimental – it’s a rather different matter if you are leaving college with £20,000 of debt. 

Pretty Ugly is for very small-scale fashion, music or cultural clients, or self-initiated. But as the recent launch of Mevis and van Deursen’s Stedelijk Museum identity (below) highlighted, it is seeping into the mainstream.

However if it wasn’t by a famous Dutch design studio and for a major institution, would we give it serious consideration? If we saw it on the side of a builder’s van would it transform from Pretty Ugly to just plain ugly?

“There are obvious aesthetic qualities connecting the work,” they say, “intentionally ‘bad’ typography; using system typefaces like Arial, Helvetica or Times; stretching them; having too much or too little letter or line spacing; deforming type on a scanner or a copier. The Pretty Ugly is a movement against the established criteria of what ‘good design’ is, in order to regain the attention of the audience and explore new territory. Entering the world of ‘wrong’ freed these designers and made any kind of experiment possible, without worrying about being thought unprofessional. Mistakes turned into virtuosity, a sign of authenticity and humanity. But it isn’t a movement that does wrong because it doesn’t know better. This is a highly educated generation of designers using their knowledge to break with what they were given as rules. They use intuition as much as intellect in order to enter new territory that is beyond so called ‘professionalism’.”

'I didn't like the, in my view, really boring and old-fashioned way a lot of my teachers looked or practiced graphic design. It just felt so uninspired, reserved and by the book.'

Super Super tries to cram in as much as possible onto every available inch of space. The reason, according to Slocombe, is that its readers (typically aged between 14 and 24) are part of the “ADD Generation”. Their alarmingly short attention spans mean that they cannot be guaranteed to look at more than one spread in any particular issue, he claims, so each one has to embody all the values of the magazine. And, he says, they have a completely different idea about colour.