If your social media is anything like mine, every advertisement you see looks very…nice. Really nice. Calming colors, minimalist logo, rounded corners, probably a sans serif font. In fact, much of our digital experience has grown to be extremely curated. Our apps and websites are easy to navigate, and it seems as if most designed content starts from the same template. In many cases, they do. Services such as Squarespace, Wix, and Canva have opened up the world of design and allowed many people access to services that can present a brand or idea in a pleasing way. But the access that templates provide inevitably brings limitations and standardization along with it. Typefaces that are flavors of sans serif are preselected, and the color palette is often made up of pastels or primaries. We know where all the buttons will be located and see the same icons and symbols across the board. And even when things don’t strictly follow a template, it feels as if they do. Many of these designs hit the same beats—simple, familiar, modern, clean, etc. Who wouldn’t like to look at this kind of design?
To me, the sameness begins to feel eerie and over orchestrated. This area of the Internet and design feels deeply professional and commercialized — everything receives a similar treatment. Many designers talk about the beginning of the internet, a time when everyone figured things out on their own and the field of design wasn’t yet established enough to allow for the trends we see today. Websites felt handmade and coded from scratch; logos were more experimental. Then, slowly, they all fell into line.
Molly Fisher labels part of this phenomena as the “Millennial aesthetic,” saying, “If you simultaneously can’t afford any frills and can’t afford any failure, you end up with millennial design: crowd-pleasing, risk-averse, calling just enough attention to itself to make it clear that you tried.” The monotony of web design and the minimal aesthetic isn’t all bad, and Fisher is right that it’s pleasing. In fact, standardization of certain elements provides a familiar and accessible user experience. Visually, almost everything is aesthetically pleasing these days, and we’ve come to expect and demand it. But should designers continue to fall in line? It’s when we begin to treat these elements as a given standard and don’t challenge them that the progress of design begins to stall. So what does this mean for the state of design? And what does it mean for the designer?
Designers must not be relegated to the margins during this age of templated creation. Perhaps the role of the designer is evolving—there can be those we can call design suppliers, who connect people in need with design sensibility that is good enough and fits the mold of Fisher’s Millennial Design. And there will be the designer who continues to push the boundaries of the field forward, who starts from the ground up and whose designs are preceded by intention, not a template. As someone who struggles and strives for uniqueness in design, I sometimes fear that these trends are so comfortable and easy that they will never need to change. But I know that someone will break the mold at some point, and I’m looking out to see what’s next. It’s possible this shift may need to come alongside a shift in the very medium of our designed content. The interaction with a screen mediates our relationship with design, and is vastly different from the way in which we previously held books or walked past billboards and posters. So designers adapted to this new context. Perhaps when the next iteration of technology comes, in whichever virtual reality it may exist, a new age of design aesthetic will arise as well.
