Book Alert: Pretty Ugly – Visual Rebellion in Design (Gestalten) |

Beauty and style canons change decade after decade in accordance with the evolutions and revolutions society goes through. In our relentlessly fast times, though, such canons change at an even more frantic pace, quite often making us ponder what we mean when we talk about aesthetic and visual values.

Pretty Ugly – Visual Rebellion in Design edited by TwoPoints.Net and published by Gestalten tries to take stock of the latest developments in visual communication, analysing graphic design and other creative disciplines that witnessed radical shifts in taste and style in the last few years.
Going from the uncanny and unexpected in graphic design, Pretty Ugly analyses album covers, free newspapers, pamphlets, posters, lookbooks, invitation cards, flyers, brochures advertising fine art, wine brands, cake shops, music festivals or club nights, going through a selection of playful, silly, dark, disturbing, pleasant or eye-catching images.

From graphic design, the book moves on including product design, furniture, fashion and art installations. There are bold and dynamic ideas that include abstract, ethereal or cosmic digital photography and collages; compositions for window shops and brands, but also jewellery pieces by designers who have been working with materials traditionally considered as ugly by society, but that are currently influencing the creative vanguards.

One interesting point is the division in themes – from "deviant" (against established criteria of what is good design) and "mundane" (converting the ordinary to the extra-ordinary) to "deconstruction" (breaking down one's cultural heritage and reconstituing it); from "impure" (unpredictable textures and international randomness) and "mishmash" (interlaced images that create new meanings) to "deformed" (distorting forms of well-known shapes) and "neo-artisanal" (a combination of digital and analog tools).

There is something for everybody in this volume – rule-breaking graphic design (Rob van den Nieuwenhuizen), photography (Nacho Alegre), furniture (Maarten Baas), digitally printed accessories (Trust Fun), and architectural fashion designs (Marga Weimans) – and this means that the volume, that also features interviews with some of the artists included, can't be pigeonholed into graphic design, but perfectly reflects the hybridic disciplines and professionals we have been forming in recent years.

Pretty Ugly is highly recommended to anybody who works in the creative industries, but also to amateur fans of graphic design and to all those artists who are into developing new and experimental visual systems.

All images in this post courtesy of Gestalten.