Member Perspectives: The case for bad taste

Good taste can become a limitation when we confuse our own aesthetic preferences with what makes design effective. There's plenty to learn from the things we dismiss as tacky or uncool, especially about making work that people feel something about.

A confession of questionable taste

I have a controversial yet brave confession to share. There are two creatures living in me. One is a designer raised on the Swiss style who worships at the altar of hierarchy, balance, rhythm and proportion. The other is a trash goblin who loves things that are lurid, theatrical, sentimental and a little too much. I'm talking pulpy paperbacks, 80s VHS covers that make your eyes bleed and tchotchkes whose commitment to glitter could only be described as structural.

I've spent a long time trying to reconcile those two parts of myself. Lately, though, I've started to think my penchant for bad taste might help keep my work from becoming forgettable. It makes me wonder what we miss when we let "good taste" make too many decisions for us.

When good taste becomes a reflex

Developing your eye is part of becoming a designer. You learn to recognize when something feels overworked or hasn't been considered enough; that instinct matters. You also pick up preferences along the way. You have your go-to typefaces for anything that needs to feel "premium," or colours you've come to associate with expensive things. After a while, it can be surprisingly difficult to tell whether you're making a sound design decision or reaching for something you already like.

"Clean," "elevated" and "timeless" are useful words when we know what we mean by them; these words can also lose meaning as they often become instructive go-tos on how to make everything look vaguely the same. We dial back the colour, restrain the typography and give it all more space until there's a little less of everything.

This practice can improve the work enormously. But I've also wondered whether sometimes in making something more sophisticated, we've removed the only thing anyone was going to remember about it.

What the supposedly tasteless gets right

My affection for horror and pulp gives me plenty of opportunities to have this argument with myself.

A lurid movie poster can be wonderfully direct about the experience it's selling. Between the dripping lettering and radioactive colours, you know what you're getting into. Even the type is in on the bit.

That doesn't mean every campaign needs a screaming face and a blood-red headline, although I am very much available for those projects. I do wonder how often we ask our work to communicate excitement while removing every visual indication of it.

Filmmaker John Waters put it beautifully in his interview with Artsy: "To understand bad taste one must have very good taste." I find that reassuring as someone whose professional judgement coexists with a love of pure excess. Appreciating this stuff takes some discernment, too. You can recognize when an outrageous choice gives something character, or when going too far is precisely what makes it work.

I'm fond of the emotional obviousness of kitsch. An extravagantly sentimental greeting card or a souvenir with an implausibly beautiful sunset makes no attempt to hide its feelings. As designers, we can be so worried about cliché that we get uncomfortable with familiar expressions of affection or pleasure. But that familiarity might be exactly why someone loves the thing. I don't think we always give that enough credit.

Camp appeals to my love of theatricality and taking things gloriously too far. Its relationship to queer culture matters, and treating it as shorthand for loud graphics misses much of what makes it interesting. From a design perspective, I'm drawn to how completely it can commit to a world of its own, right down to the styling and language. There's humour and pleasure in seeing an idea carried that far. I wonder how many concepts we give up on because they seem excessive before we've really had a chance to see where they could go.

How I work with this tension

I'm trying to pay more attention to my reactions before my designer brain starts correcting things. If something tacky catches my eye, I want to understand why. Maybe it's an odd colour combination I'd never think to use, or a headline so absurdly melodramatic I have to read it. Sometimes I'm just touched by how earnest it is. That seems worth paying attention to.

I'd like to make more room on mood boards for references that need a little explanation. A novelty package or an over-decorated menu can get a conversation going in a way that another beautifully resolved brand identity might not. It helps to be specific about what's interesting in it. If I love how abundant something feels, or how one strange detail makes it feel personal, I can work with that without simply copying its appearance.

I also want to give an unusual choice enough time to prove itself. Does it help people understand the work or connect with it? Is it something they'll recognize again? We still need to consider legibility and accessibility, and whether we're answering the brief. There's plenty of room to use our judgement without ruling something out because it doesn't immediately look like "good design."

Leaving a little room for what shouldn't work

I will always enjoy a beautifully balanced layout and a well-considered typographic system. I also want to stay curious about awkward things, excessive things, embarrassingly sincere things.

I want to leave room in my work for the things I love before I can explain why they're good. And increasingly, I'm comfortable leaving that explanation unwritten. Some things bring me joy, make me feel more like myself, or offer a little comfort in an increasingly challenging world. If "bad taste" can do all that, perhaps it's our definition of good taste that needs a little more room.