the MARTINI SHAKER

Well, as I said above, never undercut your own worth. I’m certainly not advocating creating cheap art for it’s own sake. But, one can also hopefully see that there is a need to offer affordable design alternatives to those who cannot afford more. When small businesses and other tightly budgeted organizations out there are educated on their options for receiving decent design product at a decent price, only then will they shut down Microsoft Publisher and stop churning out dreck on their own.

you know, when u really think about it, everyone at one point finds something they like and emulates it in their own fashion. Some copy outright, some just take small concepts in form or shape or color, etc. Either way, bad design itself is a truly relative term. I, of all the divine-crazy-fly-cool skool of designers out there, have been responsible for my share of crap out there. It’s from that bad design that we get around to making great ones. I do not pose to have that holier than thou mentality, but I can’t say that I’m willing to make cheap art. Rather, i make inexpensive art for my friends and exploit the hell out of everyone else, er, i mean, reasonably price my clients…lol. As for the hard salami, add some cheese & bread and let’s do lunch :)

In hindsight, I should actually have added more context into why this site has not been setting with me well. The site itself is not so much where I have my beef as how the site was borne from pious attitudes from people who take themselves too seriously.




The Bad Design Kills site was brought to my attention after scanning through this thread on the HOW Design Forums . Over the course of this thread the fellow responsible for baddesignkills.com takes (in my opinion, of course) a holier-than-thou approach that really gets me.





The aforementioned thread deals with the topic of creative plagiarism in logo design. I certainly do not endorse plagiarism in any form, and some of the logo examples Mr. Glitschka gave outraged me, but for totally different reasons than what I felt spawned the creation of his site. I was outgraged by the laziness of the plagiarizers and their inability to put forth their own effort. The proprietor of baddesignkills.com actually seems more incensed about the "craptacular rip-off" quality of the work, and the end feeling I get is that overall he feels that low-budget design is the equivalent of publicly taking a dump on a street corner. Jeez… after reading a few pages worth of his posts, I felt like creating affordably priced design for the masses is tantamaount to selling nuclear secrets to Iran!





My feeling about the thread that started my whole rant about this is twofold.



First, I applaud those who offer reasonably priced/decent quality design to small business and those who cannot afford the high prices that many of us (myself included on a number of occasions) consistently charge. Now, I'm not saying that you should give your services away unnecessarily, since that would definitely contradict my post entitled I could get an art student to do it for $35 and a six pack... never undercut your own worth. But, given the discovery of the "multi-lingual" aspect of the visual language, can we find ways to refine different dialects of the lower end of the visual language? Certainly. And, that's how I feel we gain ground and educate those who know no better... not by putting up a web site that basically calls those who create bad design stupid. That doesn't help matters.




Secondly, Pablo Picasso supposedly said "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Cameron Moll expanded the idea to include the world of design in his article Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal. We see tons of examples every day where designers steal from one another, some far less successfully than others. That overused grafitti/paint drip motif you see on nearly everything designed in the past couple of years? Yep... stolen one from another over and over and over again. Same thing with that weird deer head design motif from a year or two ago. Trends come and take hold because of creative stealing. Had these people accused of plagiarizing in that thread been a little better at adapting Picasso's quote to the design world (level 3 of Moll's article), they would have not only saved themselves from peer ridicule and potential legal action, they would have also taken inspiration from one thing, morphed it significantly to suit their needs and moved the world of design forward. Because, after all, that's what design is to me... the constant refining of our visual language to evolve it ever forward, no matter what common denominator you are speaking to.




Anyway... I'm rambling into a topic for another post.




So, I guess the question is… do I take baddesignkills.com seriously? No. Bad design does not kill just as good design does not necessarily save lives, cure cancer, reduce unemployment, etc. C'mon... we're just making pretty pictures here, people. Each of us should easily be able to distinguish between the craft of our design (i.e. general commercial design) and the craft of our art, should we choose to create any on our own time.





On an semi-unrelated note, Mr. Glitschka's illustrative work is excellent, and I would invite him to comment on this site to perhaps help me see that I may have misread the angle he was taking, or perhaps to better explain his position if indeed I do understand it correctly.




I am passionate about design and what I do, but if I ever take myself too seriously, PLEASE, someone bludgeon me with hard salami.

lmao…i actually enjoy the site you are bashing. I do not think one should take it so seriously. Besides, you need bad design out there so one could single out the good. But then again, it’s all perceptive I suppose…