This sort of item drives me crazy. “Design culture” has become such a self-congratulatory masturbatory fantasy embraced by the yuppie culture that they even sell “designer name brands” in places like Walmart. It’s crazy. Design as a commodity has jumped the shark, drunk the Kool-Aid, bitten the big one. It sucks.
As evidence, I have to show you this horrid little packet that was left on my platter at a fish-n-chips shop. Yeesh! Talk about ugly, stupid, smug, over-designed, downright icky graphics. It made me gag (worse than the fish-n-chips).
In all fairness, this was probably done by a starving, abused college-trained professional graphic designer working in a firm that landed a ton of peripheral business from a distribution company. They can crank up those billable hours for the name on the door and get to actually do “fine art” on a dab of crappy moist-wipe packaging. It’s like they got this one chance to prove their talent and they took it. And it looks like it, too.
The bottom line is that this design is functionless. It may have a small amount of “beauty” that appeals to a tiny fragment of the American population. Aside from those words “moist towelette,” it utterly fails as any sort of design language. It looks like somebody saw The Mummy (the terrible Brendan Fraser version[s]) and then was hired to translate a repair manual into hieroglyphs.
Graphic design has lost its function. It’s off the rails. Look what happened to Ed Hardy. Some marketing “genius” licensed his amazing portfolio and then turned it into air fresheners.
The problem with the graphic design culture is that it got bought and turned into twaddle. The great names like Paul Rand simply sold it to the highest bidder and their souls went with it. Now “graphic design” is synonymous with money, corporate money. We sold the process down the river through the medium of the computer, yet another corporate pitch. We are now witnessing graphic design becoming a joke, an anybody-can-do-it-if-they-buy-the-software, laugh-out-loud “You do WHAT for a living?” career option sold on late-night technical school commercials alongside welding and court reporting. Why did we do this to ourselves?