Buzz Words - Tumblr Posts
"He didn't text me back and I'm freaking out, I'm so BPD!"
No you're not. There's far more to borderline personality disorder than being a little text sensitive. Don't pretend to understand even an ounce of what I go through. Can we stop using personality disorders as buzz words?
Brad text the photo of him in full costume over to his agent. Was the wardrobe 20th century ironic overkill or post-post-post modern Madonna blatancy?!
For Brad to really WERQ this Dollar Store photo shoot, he needed to know the backstory behind the costume and it’s designer, as well a passable fabricated construct of the social media campaign.
Who was the creator? What drove he/her/them? Influenced he/her/them? Inspired he/her/them? Made he/her/them who they are?
After wondering briefly if he left out too many pronouns, Brad then text the words “storytelling” “impact” and “authenticity” exactly five seconds apart. While he found intention rarely mattered in life, he knew buzz words always got you places.
Sooooo… Where was that exactly?
Brad would learn from AI that afternoon it was a public pool in the Valley about 20 min from Kim K's mansion in regular heavy traffic.
Five minutes later, his agent would call to commend him for 'the richness in texture of his texts.' Apparently, contrast was everything when it came to... well, everything.
Wowsers! Being all over the place was finally paying off.
Brad would gleefully repeat the phrase ‘texture of texts’ until just before dinner when his boyfriend Chris told him to ‘cut it out’ Full House style. Brad had just enough time to research the gesture on the internet before sitting down but couldn't decipher if it was offensive until he pushed his kale salad around the plate long enough to feel full himself. Then it just clicked.
In a world where most people have access to the internet, having an opinion is a dangerous thing. Bringing facts to the table along with your viewpoint is essential for anyone who wants to start a conversation on a topic and while there were some points that I thought made sense in Natasha Jen’s talk, I can’t help agreeing with Richard Banfield’s critique of her critique.
While I’m not a person who really believes in the use of ‘buzz words’ to prove my point, I think that in some cases buzz words just appear naturally in conversation between two graphic designers. Buzz words are also often important to the client, depending on who you’re working with, they want to know the mystical process behind the design work.
Now, I don’t personally believe that just because you’re using a design term it’s a buzz word. I was looking at Natasha’s list of words and while some of her concerns seem to be valid, a lot of the words she listed are common, easily understood terms. (scale, empathy, user outcomes, etc.) I’d have to agree with Richard that her talk leaned more towards making jokes it seemed than actually proving anything.
I’m open to see both sides of the story, and I do think that there are probably some cases where a process is mislabeled as design thinking because it’s trendy, but I think it’s incorrect to write off a whole process just because of some outliers.
Also, though it’s popular to say so, a messy or cluttered space does not necessarily mean that the designer is a genius, nor does it mean that the designer did not use design thinking. (That felt like a desperate point in Natasha’s talk.)
The issue of ‘where crit fits’ in the process too is an odd one to me. Obviously, as a trained graphic designer, I know that crit comes at any and all stages of the process whether you’re asking for it or not. As someone who regularly critique’s my colleague’s work, I know that as soon as I show anything to them I will receive crit. Crit is in every single step of the process, for Natasha to focus so directly on where it fits almost makes me feel like she does not actually have a full understanding of her own design process, despite her lofty position.
Perhaps that is incorrect of me to say, but hey, it’s just a little bit of crit for her.
I think that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and can certainly choose to follow their design process how they see fit. Critique on a process is always welcome at any time and will be thoroughly dissected, ingested and critiqued in return by the graphic design community. The coolest part about graphic design is that we are a collection of creatives, all with different opinions and ways of doing things. If you’re going to give a talk where you critique an entire school of thought though, it’s probably best to come prepared with more than just some jokes about post it notes, buzz words and demands to see evidence when you could just google search some case studies.