Crystal Goblet Analysis

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It is the age of the index aesthetic.

Graphic design traditionally had been a service industry with the main focus being on appropriate, effective and clear communication. Type and image combine to visualize a message, with the metaphor of the crystal goblet being the over-arching goal of the work. As post-modernism shipped this idea to the glue factory, a new breed of form and content was created, allowing the viewer an active, not passive role, in reading, using language as a medium just as a piece of metal could be melted and cast into a new shape. In true Hegelian dialectic form, this spawned a movement of super graphics which spawned the handmaiden forms of lettering and tactility up to where we are now: the aggregate. Explain "Crystal Goblet"

Published on July 6, 2012 a video on youtube shows rapper Riff Raff giving viewers a tour of his "Bad" Brazilian House. The man who inspired the character Alien in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers shows an inside look of his Brazilian home, which, as described, is decked out with a flat screen, a chandelier from "Mike Tyson's before he sold it to Michael Jackson and them" and a refrigerator that "stays empty because he eats good." Riff Raff's dialogue in this three-minute video moves from one object to the next, pop culture reference to cleaning supply to gold chains to Happy Halloween. The way Riff Raff talks follows a method of free association where one idea can organically morph into another idea — much like the act of being on the internet can lead you down a Britney Spears wormhole which spits you out into an essay on gender politics which throws you face first into a pile of glittered GIF bombs. It is a non-linear format that moves an active participant from productivity to u...

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...t emerge when it does. If you organize it they will look.

The world we traverse is complex, and perhaps we are living on the surface, making sense through sorting and arranging as best we can. On trendlist.org's About section, they leave with a Wim Crouwel quote which can be telling: "You are always a child of your time, you can not step out of that! " Perhaps even if we wanted to, as designers, we cannot stop the sorting. The struggle is real.

*The apex predator graphic designer is a designer who didactically looks back instead of forward, with an instinct placed on the most obvious of outcomes and inspiration. Make it big, make it like the Swiss, the German, the Dutch. A fear of post-modernism (po-mo-phobia) and a focus on the nicety of design, sans criticality. A type of design that has not moved past the love of design to understanding contemporary discourse.

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