Has Genre Design and Illustration Hit a Dead End?

[RJBowman]

Today's subject: Has Genre Design and Illustration Hit a Dead End?

It seems like there is no longer any new interesting or innovative design in fictional genre related visual arts. Everything seems bland or derivative of something else. Have our designers and artists stagnated? Where's the new cool stuff that surprises and impresses?

I don't see any new steampunk stuff that couldn't have been made 15 years ago. But it isn't just steampunk; other science fiction and fantasy design doesn't seem to be progressing either.

Save me from depression; tell me where the good stuff is. Provide links if possible.

[J. Wilhelm]

I just realized that your question is a lot broader than design in anachronism.  But when I started to think about this, I remembered that for about 30 years or so we've been hitting the "retro button" really hard in sci-fi, music and industrial design, if you think about it.

Noir Cyberpunk in Blade Runner, Rockabilly for John Mellencamp, Edwardian panache in Thomas Dolby videos, retro Flapper fashion for Siouxie, Back to the future movie...

NeoDisco for Deep House music , AcidJazz, Candy colored apple computers, VW New Beetle, Ford Mustang in 1964 style...

There was retro in the 1960s and 70s, but overall, they were more forward thinking. 
Today's superheroes are yesterday's superheroes just redesigned, over and over. So the genre of comics is a nostalgic process too.

Perhaps we've oversaturated ourselves with nostalgia?

[RJBowman]

I just realized that your question is a lot broader than design in anachronism.  But when I started to think about this, I remembered that for about 30 years or so we've been hitting the "retro button" really hard in sci-fi, music and industrial design, if you think about it...

...There was retro in the 1960s and 70s, but overall, they were more forward thinking. 
Today's superheroes are yesterday's superheroes just redesigned, over and over. So the genre of comics is a nostalgic process too.

Perhaps we've oversaturated ourselves with nostalgia?

There doesn't seem to have been any change in casual fashion since the early 1990's. What I'm wearing right now I could have worn 30 years ago without anyone taking notice. I know I'm not the first person to point this out.

There is a theory that fashion stopped changing because common consumer technology is changing fast enough to satisfy the need for novelty. I don't know if this is true; tech hasn't changed all that much in the last ten years.

I watched a Youtube compilation of the opening credits of every mecha anime series since circa 1970. Do you know what really stood out? A series from the mid 1980's with characters in mid 80's MTV style clothing. I think that was the last time there was anything really distinctive, new, and stylish in design.

[J. Wilhelm]

I just realized that your question is a lot broader than design in anachronism.  But when I started to think about this, I remembered that for about 30 years or so we've been hitting the "retro button" really hard in sci-fi, music and industrial design, if you think about it...

...There was retro in the 1960s and 70s, but overall, they were more forward thinking. 
Today's superheroes are yesterday's superheroes just redesigned, over and over. So the genre of comics is a nostalgic process too.

Perhaps we've oversaturated ourselves with nostalgia?

There doesn't seem to have been any change in casual fashion since the early 1990's. What I'm wearing right now I could have worn 30 years ago without anyone taking notice. I know I'm not the first person to point this out.

There is a theory that fashion stopped changing because common consumer technology is changing fast enough to satisfy the need for novelty. I don't know if this is true; tech hasn't changed all that much in the last ten years.

I watched a Youtube compilation of the opening credits of every mecha anime series since circa 1970. Do you know what really stood out? A series from the mid 1980's with characters in mid 80's MTV style clothing. I think that was the last time there was anything really distinctive, new, and stylish in design.

Well, when it comes to clothing, it kind of depends on the particular crowd you hang out with, but even the Goth scene is old or "vintage" by now. In the 2000s "The Matrix" re animated the Cyberpunk genre, and created s new cyberpunk style fashion that I find is as a derivative of Goth, just with technology and a slightly different palette (lots of primary color neon accents over black). But that's an over 20 year old trend!!

With the advent of AI in design, now there's a lot of cyberpunk nostalgia presence in industrial design (see graphics oriented sources like Pinterest, for example, for both Cyberpunk fashion an industrial design trends). I'd strongly recommend taking a look at the industrial design scene, because AI is now recharging the retro trends.

For example, teenagers are now going bananas over compact cassette players like the walkman, to the point that the Chinese manufacturing machine is cranking out cassette players and cassette boomboxes. They callthe movement "Low-Fi," and it can either be Mid Century oriented, or Cyberpunk, depending on the particular crowd.  That's because the 1980s are now a mythical era of sorts (modern-retro-modernism?). None of the resuscitated old tech items have the style or panache of the original 80s articles though. The aesthetics are significantly degraded, probably as part of an oversimplified 1980s stereotype.

[RJBowman]

For example, teenagers are now going bananas over compact cassette players like the walkman, to the point that the Chinese manufacturing machine is cranking out cassette players and cassette boomboxes. They callthe movement "Low-Fi," and it can either be Mid Century oriented, or Cyberpunk, depending on the particular crowd.  That's because the 1980s are now a mythical era of sorts (modern-retro-modernism?). None of the resuscitated old tech items have the style or panache of the original 80s articles though. The aesthetics are significantly degraded, probably as part of an oversimplified 1980s stereotype.

I just heard about something called "citypop" which is just Japanese pop music from the 1980's. Apparently it's popular now with American yout or at least was recently. I found out about it because I was looking for music from the original Bubblegum Crisis manga.

If the eighties are now a far off mythical era, maybe the next big fictional genre will be science fiction set in the eighties. I, myself, would rather see seventies inspired science fiction, with bionic men, android gunfighters, and talking computers.

[Justin Time]

When I was considering taking some college design/art classes in the 80s someone in the industry told me "The only thing they teach is what's hot right now. The result will be that you'll be producing stuff that looks just like everyone else's and by the time you graduate, the trend will have changed. They do not teach creativity; you either have it or you don't".

Art is always derivative, or at least, inspired by something else and there's nothing wrong with that, in general, but there is more of a tendency now to just ape what others have done.

Take the design of the title machine in 1960's The Time Machine, for example. The design was like nothing that had been seen before and really stands out, but most of the subsequent time machine designs on (the Wells novel-related) book covers, games and TV shows are clearly either slight reworkings of that 1960 design or heavily inspired by it.  The design in the 2002 film used only a few small elements from the 1960 design, but IMO they over-designed it (though I still like it).

With concept design in general now, there's been an over-reliance on graphics software plug-ins to add predefined textures and details.  Designers used to have to rely on creative thinking for how they could provide something new and different or use existing materials in new ways the public wasn't familiar with. Hence the walls of the turbo lifts in Star Trek: The Motion Picture had wall panels detailed/textured with rubber carpet backer; something the general public wouldn't spot but a carpet installer would probably laugh at loud when they spotted it. The same with the props of Star Wars; repurposed old camera parts galore that only camera enthusiasts would recognize.

Now designers can design whatever and have a 3D printer or CNC cut and shape whatever they want. Which is great and a time/money saver for creating highly detailed or unusual shapes and textures, BUT with that ease has come a certain "laziness" and artificial "feel".

After Dr. Who was revived, they started using this new "Gallifreyan writing" that was all overlapping circles, half circles and whatnot.  The thing is, during the same period, I had started seeing shopping bags and other items with the same sort of design printed all over them.  I commented to someone I knew who was taking a design class and she said "Yeah, it's an Illustrator plug-in".  So instead of coming up with something truly different, they apparently just used a plug-in so they could do things more quickly and easily.

It's so much easier to have things filled in by existing computer tools, and if that's the kind of "creativity" they're teaching at design school, then things are bound to all have a sameness to them. Especially when kids (in the internet age) grow up thinking that copying or cribbing from someone else's work is "creative". Every so often you get something really original looking like the airships of John Carter (movie) but it seems to be rarer and rarer.

Thank you for reading the first installment of "Old Art Guy Yells at Cloud"

[J. Wilhelm]

Thank you for reading the first installment of "Old Art Guy Yells at Cloud"

[rovingjack]

it's kinda tricky because it's more than one thing at play here.

one part of it is the feeling like the past was more profound than it was. I can't tell you how surreal it is to listen to the music of angry rebellious youth of slightly before my time and be part amused and part frustrated by how much it sounds like perky pop tunes to me in comparison to something like dark elctronica with elements of trance.

another part is looking to existing frameworks of genre for development, where there is so much disillusionment with the whole of the world as it is and the models of how we got here that innovation isn't seeking to sow it's seeds in this salted earth anymore.

yet another part of it is that history of innovation is almost an accidental result of reviving anciet halcyon days that never were, by people nostalgic for a time they never experienced before and don't understand they aren't getting quite right. Ren fairs recreate an fantastical version of The Renaissance which was itself a fantastical recreation of elements of classical times, which were a fantastical recreation of mythological ideal people of legends and heroic myths of the founding of human history. we can see this 'rebooting' happening in people engaging in fantasy reimagining of how paleolithic human diets and lives are somehow what we are supposed to be and we've screwed it up and need to go back to those ways. or the new wave of the hippies, who were a revival of a simpler time that is what inspired Tolkien for his idillic world of hobbit way of life. or the people trying to revive the 1940-50s to bring out countries back to living like those eras had no problems or issues.

part of it is there's not a louder single course to follow. we've been spread out in splinter cells with different focuses. even if you take into account that there were times where victorian, edwardian, art Nouveau, art deco and streamline modern were going on together and likely a dozen other things that never captured enough energy to get noticed outside of niches... our world is so many bubbles isolated from each other and unwilling to look or work within a broader cultural core anymore.

there's also an element of 'the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed' going on in the world where the stage of what's before our eyes is a global feed, so the sense that somebody in place to see Rothko or Pollock emerge on the art scene could only notice at the time because their world was smaller and didn't include what was emerging in south east asia, russia, the middle east, eastern europe, central africa, columbia... a pollock today would have a sea of other artistic 'nonsense' sapping the ability to generate attention for their own work.

And honestly there's probably a lot happening that we don't think about because it either isn't something we like or we think doesn't look like culture happening because it's not where we are used to seeing it or in a form we recognize.

an example in tabletop gaming culture is the number of old timers who complain about how 5e dnd is bloated with furry races. it's mentioned like it makes the game childish and stupid, with rabbit people, turtle people, frog people, bird people, dragon people, cat people... this isn't fantasy worlds to them, it's cartoons and childishness. but 120 years from now maybe our cyborg descendants will augment themselves with catgirl chassies for some classic fantasy nostalgia.

solarpunk, adventure time, a modge podge of retro like a time travelers layover port where a cyberpunk a noir detective, a carribean pirate and arthurian knight stop for sushi and a double caramel mochachinno on their vacation through colonial williamsburg.

only later will we be able to see what happened. hindsight being 2020 afterall.

[Sorontar]

Remember that going retro has been around for centuries. Even in the Renaissance and Victorian eras, people would do revival trends, harking back to the good old days of the Roman Empire etc. The issue is whether the re-imagining of old symbols and myths in a new context can create more than just new perspectives, but also new themes and practises.

Sorontar

[J. Wilhelm]

Well, that's one of my points with AI.  One of the things that I've found out in using it, is that AI doesn't give you exactly what you want. Sure you can toy with the constraints to the point you get the same portrait with someone else's face on it, but otherwise as soon as you relax the constraints AI races to steal imagery from a vast repository.

Since all the images are not catalogued by era or style, even it you specify a particular era, AI will use the time domain of a "Gaussian curve of styles" to fulfill your request. So AI inadvertently introduces "time errors" and forces some anachronism into your design, whether you asked for it or not.  AI can only grab images from the past. It can't imagine a future...

Or can it? I'd human styles are partly based on the past and we've always had anachronism as a procedural design feature, isn't AI just supercharging the same process?