Following up on that last post, here’s Tibor Kalman weighing in on being bad:

We have to forget what we learend in design school about appropriateness. We have to dump all those awkward phrases taught at overpriced seminars on “Getting Your Message Across to the Client.” We have to learn to listen to our gut instincts instead of corporate rhetoric. We have to be brave and we have to be bad. If we’re bad, we can be the esthetic conscience of the business world. We can break the cycle of blandness. We can jam up the assembly line that spits out one dull, lookalike piece of crap after another. We can say, “Why not do something with artistic integrity or ideological courage?” We can say, “Why not do something that forces us to rewrite the definition of ‘good design’? Most of all, bad is about recapturing the idea of that a designer is the representative— almost a missionary— of art, within the world of business. We’re not here to give them what’s safe and expedient. We’re not here to help clients eradicate everything of visual interest from the face of the earth. We’re here to make them think about design that’s dangerous and unpredictable. We’re here to inject art into commerce. We’re here to be bad.

Of course, this was 1990. A lot has changed in the design world during the last 17 years. Street culture has been appropriated (some say expropriated) for ‘edgy’ design, and the cool-hunters are looking for the next fix.

Wince-worthy stupidity and intentionally politically-incorrect seem to be the flavors du jour, but what’s next? Will the new wave of DIY media makers offer something of value or just be absorbed into the advertising world’s next trend?