Design Disruptors, and the Tech Aesthetic

I’ll try to keep this short, because it’s just a thought.

Most people in design communities, have by now heard of the Design Disruptors documentary by now. In case you missed it, here’s the teaser:

Today’s most disruptive companies have a new guiding principle: a fierce focus on customer-centric product design. DESIGN DISRUPTORS features an elite group of 15 disruptive companies—valued at one trillion dollars combined—who share the perspectives and sacrifices necessary to upend age-old industries and disrupt the status quo.

I myself love movies about Silicon Valley’s brave elite groups that disrupt the status quo.¹

No—I’m not here to be snarky about the movie²—I’m here to dissect the choice of the movie’s title font, and make the case that it’s a bad choice.

I find it ironic that a movie about good design, and specifically about design coming out of Silicon Valley would choose a font that (a) is over-designed, and (b) nothing like tech’s design aesthetic.

Let me start by clarifying what the tech aesthetic is. The tech aesthetic is all about friendly, casual, understated wealth. Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie might have defined “tech casual,” but for me Patagonia clothing is the bread and butter of “tech casual.” Patagonia is expensive outdoorsy wear that says (1) I’m Californian, (2) I’m casual, (3) I have money , but (4) I’m trying to be indirect about it. It’s clothing that’s expensive, without being expensive.

“I might be outdoorsy”

The other company I would point to as a key barometer of the tech aesthetic is of course Google. Google, which is all about having fun while changing the world (and trying not to be evil) has historically had colorful, silly logotypes. Their new sans-serif variant takes things tactfully and teasingly close towards childish—but the end effect is the same as it’s always been: casual, simple, friendly.

“Welcome to the internet”

(just for fun)

In other words, the tech aesthetic is all about communicating friendly, casual, approachable, with clean forms, and use of color. This intention tends to guide and define a lot of products coming out of Silicon Valley—think of the twitter bird, and snapchat’s ghost. Now compare our friendly silicon valley aesthetic to the logotype chosen for our documentary:

One of these is a movie about heroes saving the world

I mean the all-caps, highly-kerned, sans-serif font was bad enough to place it firmly in the “Space movie aesthetic”—but then they had to get clever, and started erasing parts of the lettering, and by then things were totally out of hand. Running it through Dieter Ram’s 10 principles, it fails on at least half of the criteria.

violated-rules2

No I understand why they did it. They wanted to cast our designers as heroes, and give the Design field as a whole…well, some gravitas—some sense of larger scale, and importance. One way to do this is to adopt the aesthetic of something of a similar scale—to work associations to your advantage.

The film’s director

The problem is you just can’t take it seriously. Sooner or later, you see right through it. Design as field, and as a subject of documentary, can’t fill shoes that big. Designers are people—not space heroes.

This heavy-handed, functionally-damned design approach to the film’s typography is not real design, but something I generally call designy—where you take something, and give it an overstated design, rather than an appropriate design. It’s the kind of stuff you might get when a marketing manager has too much say, or keeps asking for more “oomph.”

Unfortunately, the designy approach creates the wrong design rhetoric—the look and feel communicated by the design. To me, the typeface makes the design field look colder and less inviting. It’s as though the director was explicitly trying to make the field look harder. Why?

It also makes our design saga characters look a little less friendly, and a little more alien. Not unlike heroes, maybe—but heroes from another planet.