laofficina
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December 2024
I have already written this same article three times. The first time I wrote it I was trying to bring the design community from Instagram back to X so we all could agree to disagree, learn from each other and co-exist in a new inclusive and happy design culture. Huge mistake on my part. The Instagram crowd hated it (and me) and gave me a very puritan middle-class LinkedIn sneer silent-treatment big dose of hate.
The second time I wrote this article I was neck deep negativity and I wrote a rant. A funny rant but a rant and rants are almost never productive. That bad reception got to me.
So here goes the third one. Let’s go.
Design is closer to the luxury industry than it is to creativity. Once an idea grows all-powerful, designers learn that power wants more of it to perpetuate itself and the powerless want more or it to access power so, designers follow the formula and cash-in, the idea becomes saturated and then the idea dies. When an idea dies, design becomes a game of chairs and the Jaguar team lost. We all have done the Jaguar bit in the past but we grabbed our chair sooner. Nobody is innocent in the design world but only one lost. Sorry Jaguar.
We have entered a new era. We can kick and scream as much as we want but Ai is here to stay, this new multipolar social media world is here to stay, the suspicion of dead internet is here to stay, new ideologies are here to stay, and new masters are here to stay (for the time being of course, let’s give it another ten years).
“One goes broke little by little and then all of a sudden” they say. It feels sudden because you were not paying attention to gradual change. This big change is not a fluke but I am sure it felt sudden for the Jaguar team. They thought they were the vanguard one day and they woke up a joke the next.
If you believe in an idea, it always seems the idea dies unfairly at its peak but maturity peaking is what kills ideas. When an idea becomes too popular, too obvious and too tired; it dies.
Jaguar was perfect and that perfection is precisely why it was so universally laughable. Jaguar was ridiculous because it was the perfect final form of an idea (an apotheosis). It was so perfect that everyone, from the smartest to the dumbest, knew exactly why it was bad, and how to make fun of it.
Think about Jaguar like the last believer of dead orthodoxy while everyone had already moved onto the next thing. It is sad, it is funny, and it deserves mockery.
"If you look through design history and you see something that looks really radical, that's what you're going to be doing now. If you think that's nice, that's what you've already been doing. If you think it's tired, that's what you were doing five years ago. But if you think it's ugly, that's what you're going to be doing in five years." — Paula Scher
The reason why immortality does not happen in living systems is that immortality is unlikely (accidents happen) and useless. There would only be protocells on earth if it wasn’t for death. There is no evolution without death. Death is vital.
If Dracula was real, the man would have locked himself up in his castle after sixty years to spend the rest of his immortal life being depressed about how the world changed for the worst. Immortality is a sad sack cranky old man stuck in the past, forever.
Death forces change. The only way renewal can happen is through death. So Jaguar death good, let’s celebrate it and move on.
We should move on but not everyone will and not everyone will be able to. Let’s come back to death.
My father in law was an illustrator for the ad industry from the 70s to the late 90s. I have learnt a lot listening to his stories, looking at his portfolio and and meeting his design friends. Everything I have learnt from him is what I learnt from Jaguar.
Throughout his professional life, every time a new technology came in, at least half of creatives were left behind loving the old craft. Every time the zeitgeist changed, at least half of creatives were left behind loving the old ideas. Lesson is to not get stuck in the past, shed your old skin and let go.
Lots of people will get stuck and it will be very tempting to get stuck with them because they will do the best version of the old thing. The old thing thing will be very very comfy and very very tempting but do not stay there. Move to the unconformable, unstable, energetic and strange thing because those are the signs of the new. Believe me, It will pay off.
In my first iteration of this article I was trying to save that half of creatives stuck in Jaguar world. I wanted to use their language and their ideas to save them from the sinking ship. Tempting but wrong. Death must happen for life to continue. Death is always sad but it must happen.
More or less at the same time my grandmother passed away, the grandfather of a friend of mine also passed away but also around that time my son was born while my friend stayed single. How my friend and I felt after those deaths could not have been more different. Death without birth is the pit of hell. Do not let death caught you empty handed. New life, always.
Jaguar is dead, and dead ideas along with dead designers must be left behind. Do not talk to them, do not explain anything, and do not attempt to save anyone. They are bitter and angry. Let them go.
The creative vanguard is dead, mass media gave us the illusion of creative Progress and it died. Good. From the corpse of fake Progress we are getting this new bubbling stew of creativity, insanity, conspiracy theories, crypto everything, meme whatever, infinity micro cultures and fantastic weirdness. Accept.
If you are a bien-pensant upper middle class soul who wants to feel reassured and proper in a soft cocoon of good manners… I have bad news. If you are a curious insatiable and tireless freak, you will love this.
I am a big fan of Cyber Futurism and not (just) because of how it looks but mostly because of what it means. Everybody knows we live in an 80s cyber dystopia and while one (understandable) reaction is film cameras and dumb phones, the other reaction is to fully accept it and make it your own. The only answer to death is more life and a smile. The answer to Ai is not pen and paper, the answer to Ai is to centaur it. Maybe we can allow for ourselves a bit of saudade but never become too clingy.
I do not know if Cyber Futurism is the future future but what I know about the future is that it will not be like the past. If you think the future is “going back to more tangible experiences” or any other form of “going back to”, you are very wrong. The future will be different. Always forward, never backward.
The best words about Jaguar have already been said and if you agree, you know what those are and you know they are hilarious. If you disagree, I will not repost them here because sad sacks in their last moments are vindictive so, whatever, do your thing, bye.
Bye Jaguar vibes.