Roblog

Creatives’ social media accounts are awash with lo-fi, analogue aesthetics, most of which are created digitally, often with cookie-cutter kits that undermine the whole idea of what “analogue” is supposed to represent. Elizabeth Goodspeed understands why:

“The practical reality is that most people no longer have the time, tools, or support to make fully analogue work, even if they want to. The creative infrastructure that would make it viable – materials access, slower timelines, financial stability – isn’t widely available. Designers and illustrators are stuck in a bind: analogue signals value, but digital is what’s feasible. The result is a kind of strategic mimicry. The market is looking for particular cues, and designers have to find a way to hit them. It doesn’t help that glossy, computer-made work can now be mistaken for AI either; clean, high-fidelity digital craft has become suspect by default, making handmade a safer choice. You can think of adding in fake ink splatters a bit like penciling in a beauty mark: an intentional imperfection done to signal authenticity, rather than the byproduct of a real nuisance.”

Rather than using these analogue cues for merely surface-level styling reasons, or to signal “this isn’t AI”, Elizabeth hopes that we can use this analogue fixation as part of a broader reckoning about how and why creative work is made, and to whose benefit:

“When analogue collapses into surface style, it stops applying pressure to how work is made and valued. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Arts & Crafts movement, for instance, emerged alongside mass mechanisation and responded not with nostalgia, but with structural reorganisation. Designers and makers pushed back against the factory’s division of labour by reasserting continuity between thinking and making. Objects were produced slowly, often collaboratively, with an emphasis on material knowledge and visible decision-making. They were sold through guilds and exhibitions that foregrounded craft as labour, not just aesthetic, and delivered tangible financial benefits to the people who made them. There’s a version of today’s analogue fixation that could move in this direction.”

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A brilliant takedown of the menu icons in the latest version of MacOS, a version I’m still steadfastly refusing to upgrade to, from Niki Prokopov.

Apple decided to do a thing that was both impossible and undesirable, then did it badly:

“In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

“But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

“And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.”

In referencing the Human Interface Guidelines from 1992, Niki makes a point that many people would do well to remember:

“…is an interface manual from 1992 still relevant today? Haven’t computers changed so much that entirely new principles, designs, and idioms apply?

“Yes and no. Of course, advice on how to adapt your icons to black-and-white displays is obsolete. But the principles – as long as they are good principles – still apply, because they are based on how humans work, not how computers work.

“Humans don’t get a new release every year. Our memory doesn’t double. Our eyesight doesn’t become sharper. Attention works the same way it always has. Visual recognition, motor skills – all of this is exactly as it was in 1992.”

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This collection of label designs from Portuguese fish cans is a treasure trove of typography, vernacular design, and wonderful illustrations. There are thousands to get stuck into.

Three favourites:

(Love the gnomes.)

(Does what it says on the tin, I suppose.)

(The world’s snootiest sardine.) #