What’s the value of creating something if it cannot be distinguished by people as something new? This is an especially existential question for disciplines like graphic design which hold “new” aesthetics in such high regard.

Perhaps we should shift away from myopically chasing visual complexity. In this world, the ability to create meaning by cultivating communities and tools is a better use of our time.

Algorithms, capable of aesthetic categorization, generation and style transfer bypass the need for craft on many fronts. While most examples today apply this to historic art styles, it’s a reasonable speculation that people will be able to apply a style – however nascent – to their own sets of information.

Some of our Twitter favorites like album art, posters, merchandise, and illustration are first in line to go because of their availability.

Style transfer examples from the Intuitive Guide to Neural Style Transfer.

Given this speculation, the time an image can exist as a novel, new aesthetic before it is copied is reduced to minutes:

Imagine your friend posts a new design. It features a unique mix of novel ideas – shaders, analog processes, hard earned familiarity with the medium, lots of time, and so on. After it’s shared, someone else detects it is gaining traction so they – enabled by friends or a botnet – instantly tweet copies. These have their own set of information, are indistinguishable from the original and are more widely shared.

Nice. Historically, this has never been a good tradeoff for the designer as a craftsperson. This happens today within the span of hours in the form of replies, blatant copies and remixes. At this point we should check what investments in visual design, if any are wise.

Communication Decay

If we measure the “value” of a design by how long it uniquely communicates a given message, its value decays quickly ⁽¹⁾. On social networks today, the moment a flat image is posted online, it’s subject to being copied.

Figure A: Value of a design shared on a network. As time passes it becomes less unique (due to copies and remixes) and its message gradually becomes diluted.

Figure B: Value of a design shared on a network with ML reproduction. The moment a new design has been introduced it’s immediately lifted, causing its value to drop off.

Charts comparing the decay of an image’s uniqueness once it’s been posted, with standard tools (A) and ML driven style transfer (B).

When there’s style lifting, there is a collapse in the time it takes to create derivative works. Any message can be instantly diluted, the original time and effort invested to create don’t matter. Tellingly, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction explains the “mechanical” element in photography’s ability to capture representations faster than they can be drawn.

"For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. "

These mechanical advancements foreshadowed the ML tools of today. They can move faster than our hands. Currently our hands take the form of design tools/plugins, fonts, photography, 3D renders, illustration and filters – all of which are ways to create digital objects. Historically, these objects of style became widely available to lower classes through industrialism:

“The “democratization” of elite images of wealth exploded with the rise of industrialism and mass production by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Imitations of aristocratic style became affordable for the burgeoning middle class. Extravagant fake ornamentation came to replace quality and craftsmanship in conveying the value of material goods.”
— Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture

When reproduction speed drastically changes, the definition of value shifts, along with the role of designer in the industry. The digital revolution of the early 2000s lowered the barrier to entry for design through pirated design tools and widely available tutorial videos. ML tools go beyond this in a couple of ways:

1. They can generate derivative works using completely new sets of information.

2. They can be deployed on a wide network scale (bots and automation).

Not only is a design’s original aesthetic novelty compromised, but its style is no longer tied to the original message.

Product defensibility

From an economic standpoint, this resurfaces a question:

Does the time cost for a given design meet the value of the message that will be communicated to the audience, with the assumption that other parties will be able to instantly reproduce it?

Designing anything involves a balance of time, cost management and effectiveness towards a goal. Deadlines and budget constraints prevent designers from having the resources to make masterpieces of each and every design (as lovely as this would be).

Looking at the production of graphic design from a product design perspective can help us come to terms with its place in an economic system ⁽²⁾. Digital products aim to construct defensible moats in a market through combinations of hard to reproduce business positions (network effect momentum, actionable data, consumer loyalty, cost advantages through supply chains, proprietary intellectual property and manufacturing processes, etc). Single features may be reproducible, but strong products generally have many advantages that work together in concert.

In an ML reproduction dominated world, there are several visual design approaches that may be better suited towards giving the designer more agency.

1. Unique, extensible and rapid production tools

There are advantages to be gained through rapid tool-based design exploration.

Many designers develop a unique set of tools, cultural experiences or processes for bespoke form making. These take the form of things like refined ideas, code, materials and knowledge of the medium. They are often catalyzed through collaborations with other artists. Generally, these are kept close to the chest, as they provide a designer with exclusive ways of creating forms ⁽³⁾.

It’s worth noting that the ability to efficiently create new aesthetics doesn’t ensure it will be effective at communicating. The human designer is largely responsible for this piece.

A successful tool within a style transfer pervasive world would give designers options for communicating in an extensible manner ⁽⁴⁾, at a rate that creates “value” more efficiently than the sunk cost incurred from designs being copied. This would be through exceedingly high potential for variation and craft at a low time cost to the designer.

Some more limited but existing examples today are things like custom photoshop brushes or chrome type techniques. These are methods that can be easily applied to a variety of different forms through a designer’s free intent. Future techniques could provide more dimensions of expression. Sometimes, these complex tools enable products and experiences that are not easily reproducible.

2. Rich interaction

Designs with interaction and functionality have additional layers that make them increasingly harder to copy. The simplest format to reproduce is a 2D image – it can be easily copied and saved. Animation requires additional work to save the whole file instead of just an individual frame. Further up the ladder are websites and apps ⁽⁵⁾. These can be reverse engineered without source code, but the level of effort to reproduce them is much higher. Server-side code, databases and real-time player to player interaction demand progressively more effort to recreate.

This is inline with the move from the audience as observers towards the audience as active participants in media:

...we are moving away from a reality in the modernity framework, where the audience is just an observer...As designers, we should find ways to engage the audience in our work so that they see themselves as the main characters, so that they have an opportunity to relive their own dreams and get inspired by them.
– ​David Rudnick: The Ultra-reality of Graphic Design by Sasha Dorfman

In a world saturated with flat images, increasing fidelity and interaction opens up additional avenues for expression. Emphasizing real time signals and feedback can help the audience engage on personal and temporal levels that cannot be lifted. While snapshots of an interactive design can be shared, the primary piece of communicative value resides in the moment and psychological state it’s experienced in.

3. Format ownership

Proprietary formats sometimes provide advantages through superior fidelity (for example, things like richer interaction, color gamuts and losslessness), performance (file size) and support. These require tight market control beyond the resources of an individual designer’s influence.

Limiting access through community or cryptographic methods can be used to slow down how quickly something is copied at the expense of reach. Patrons on Patreon or group members in a Discord may have exclusive access to designs until they are leaked. Some token based approaches like Zora and Super Rare provide mechanisms for capturing and proving ownership through ledgers of authenticity. A low resolution version of the design may be shared with a wider group, while the owner keeps the original.

Designs can also be tuned to be less prone to reproduction through GANS. Counterintuitively, the appearance of these may not be what designers deem tasteful at first, as they are targeting an algorithm feature space.

Admittedly, none of these feel naturally defensible. Custom tools, complex experiences and access limiting formats each require a significant investment of time in their own right. Where should we invest design time if newness is elusive and tools / formats alone are stop-gaps?

Manufacturing Meaning

Designers need to shift their design value judgement from one that venerates visual craft to one that emphasizes message encoding and transmission. When it can be instantly reproduced, the primary value of a design is its context and timeliness, one of the key points in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence."

A design can still be deployed within a uniquely personal context. While designs on a network can be unevenly distributed or be immediately distilled by copies, the initial experience can act as the portal to a message.

New tools, experiences and formats must support the designer’s bid for creating, delivering and exerting influence over a design’s message. Correspondingly, the design process requires a translation of the client’s communication goals through a designer’s intuition and taste. There’s an opportunity here to evade reproduction. Synthesis of complex information and meaning structures may not be easily liftable through algorithms.

Particularly, designs can be positioned to contain coded references, memes or ideas understood only by the audience and designer:

“...ragtag squads of shitposters have the power to define new forms of value based on their own esoteric social frameworks. Memeing produces "assets" that cannot be traditionally valued, but are capable of commanding cultural and economic movements."
– Squad Wealth by Other Inter”

Organized groups of people can work together to generate their own frameworks of meaning by building camaraderie with their audience. A group on Discord can create inside jokes, visual references, memes and new tastes – disseminating them to various corners of a network. While universal visual language and craft is susceptible to being diluted through reproduction, vernacular messages within community native designs are out of the way of aesthetic algorithmic approaches.

Depending on the aesthetic and audience, this type of encoded referential design can provide a more efficient path to deliver ideas then exclusive investment in messaging through visual craft.

The primary value of graphic design in modern times has been its ability to rapidly convey information to a given audience with a low barrier to entry. A flat, impactful – yet transient image. If a discipline that deals primarily with visual communication is to persist, it must focus all the more on the networked cultivation and co-authorship of meaning, enabled by tools that propel craft into wider and richer forms of communication. That is how we give things form.

Huge thank you to those who provided critical review: Weiwei Hsu, Wolf Böse, Adarsh Rao, Tomo Kihara and Toby Shorin.

---

Thoughts? Let me know @Aetherpoint

---

Footnotes