Cult of the Ugly

The Cult of the Ugly was written by Steven Heller in 1993 criticizing the designs today are UGLY. In his words, the examples I'm showing are what he would have, no doubt, called ugly. But who defines ugly and beauty? The audience/viewer, so it's really up to you (anyone and everyone) to say if they're ugly.

The Post Modern examples are really great inspirational pieces. These are a couple of my favorites and the lest favorite one.

This one by Ed Fella and P. Scott Makela is so simple and disturbing yet drives the message so effectively.



This, of course, is by David Carson. I think this is almost his signature layout.
I tried to do his type treatment the other day, but it's just not the same.



This poster, designed by Stephan Sagmeister, is my least favorite of all. I'm just so disgusted by the two tongues that are sticking out. I know they are replacing the arms of 'F' and 'E', but I just hate it. However, if not the tongues, I love the poster—I love the handletterings, the 'F' and 'E' bracketing the title, and I love that it's messy but organized too. He's one of my favorite designers, but I hate his two tongues.




Reading the very, very long interview with Steven Heller, one of Emigre's essays, I realized that Heller seemed to contradict himself many times. Or perhaps his reasonings are not very clearly laid out, like on a map, so everything repeatedly goes forward and backwards. It takes some time to understand some of his reasons, but nonetheless, the interview was good. I'm glad I got to read it.
(He seemed to really dislike the designers from Cranbrook.)


From Katherine McCoy's essay, 'Rethinking Modernism, Revising Functionalism':

"[The Swiss International style] approach was fairly foreign to American clients and in 1968 it was remarkably difficult to convince corporate clients that a grid-ordered page with only two weights of Helvetica was appropriate to their needs. Now, of course, one can hardly persuade them to let give up their hold on "Swiss", so completely has the corporate world embraced rationalist Modernism in graphic design.

So once upon a time American corporations didn't like the Swiss style, how about that. Perhaps they even thought it was too plain, too simple, too ugly... My point is, what seems ugly now might be the normal standard of style/design later. Like McCoy pointed out, and we see it everyday still, it's hard to break from the style today.


Like Heller says, "Ask a toad what is beauty... He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back." What you see is ugly might seem beautiful to someone else, think of all the culture today and how different they are from each other.

We should embrace the ugly designs, and we should especially learn from them. Just like Segmeister's tongues, someone else might love them. I learned from it, and who knows, someday I just might do something like that.