Is 2024 the Year of In-between?

When did normal become the only normal?

My daughter said to me a while back - “We don’t know right now if we are in a before, or in an after.” To say that phrase stuck with me would be an understatement. I feel like its a billboard every time I set foot outside my door.

The sentiment behind it is simple. We are living in a time of transition. We have a sense that something new is coming, that there is a “next,” and even loosely what the implications of that are. But we don’t have the same sense of what this future looks, feels, or sounds like -in both the figurative and literal senses. And if you happen to be a designer, this might make you a little twitchy.

There’s an adage that I’ve always tried to adopt in my life around getting comfortable with discomfort, even convincing myself and the design crews I’ve worked with that this place of discomfort is where the only truly groundbreaking work comes from. And so, if you believe that statement, maybe this feeling right now is perfectly fine and dandy and this is how things have always been during times of upheaval. Of course that doesn’t mean any of this is easy, because it is hard to find your feet, much less to do meaningful work, when everything underneath and around you feels undefined.

All of which might explain some of the output we’ve been seeing recently. It’s no great revelation that in times of greatest uncertainty we find ourselves drawn to things that feel the safest.? We experienced this firsthand during COVID, and we are seeing this pattern returning now. While there’s bits and bobs of solid work being done out there, we’re also seeing that there’s precious little that is leading. And tons, nay shit-tons, that is painfully, cringingly risk averse across every category of creative.

Sat through a round of commercials recently? It used to be: can you remember the brand the ad was pimping? These days can you even remember the ad? In graphic design this is manifesting itself in a mass movement towards the reductive. The “everything the same all the time” marks that peculiarly have taken over even (shudder to think) the fashion brands. If anyone was about setting trends and blazing new trails, it's supposed to be those folk. And yet, and yet, and yet…

Maybe we’ll find our feet in these uncertain times through AI, but a part of me doubts it. With AI being after all, a creative output guided by existing prompts, is that the path to a vision for tomorrow?

My favorite quote about "made by AI" creative that I read recently said “There’s ton of Elvis impersonators out there. Some are good. Most are bad. But even the very best of them aren’t Elvis.” ?And that’s kind of the point really. I'm excited to see how AI is going to make my life easier. But giving us a North Star to the radical and new? I'm just not seeing it. At least, not yet.

It’s going to take some true innovators, some originals, some barnstormers and especially some new voices to get us out of this funk. And to bring us something akin to the explosion of new forms and expressions that came about a whole century ago. That's right, in the 1920s. Or the same that came along in the 50s, or the 80s. Each of these decades’ broke conventions, introduced new forms of creative expression and gave us a plethora of ideas we’d never even imagined before. And guess what? Those periods came after periods just like this one.

Periods of in-between.

And so, as we emerge into this New Year perhaps it’s time for a little rebellion. A little risk. A little vision. And instead of hiding scared, maybe we creatives should just come out swinging. I for one am hungry for the new forms just around the corner. For the new typologies. For these glimpses of what’s next.

And to paraphrase. From Fight Club this time. Not just: “copies, of copies, of copies.”