“I picked a bad time to become a critic” – Elizabeth Goodspeed on the collapse of design critique

In an excellent, important essay on visualization critique, dataviz pioneers Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas address how the internet and ubiquitous publishing make viz critique a coarser, more brutal thing: All redesigns have the potential to seem adversarial, as if the critic is pointing out flaws in the designer personally, asserting their

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But with less separation between art and commerce, Montgomery says, “there’s some self-censorship that happens. If you’re a little too knowledgeable about PR, you start to become way too aware of things like posting schedules, and it’s impossible to be punk anymore.”

For as long as there is no clear consensus on what design represents, it will be prey to more muddles and clichés.

Here we see a really pivotal moment of change, when art must become something that does not make people uncomfortable, so that they will spend money. The kind of person who is expected to consume art is transformed in the mind of the producer. The people who might very possibly love being expanded by what they see are never given the chance. They'

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- The problem is one of content. The misconception is that without deep content, design is reduced to pure style, a bag of dubious tricks. In graphic-design circles, form-follows-function is reconfigured as form-follows-content. If content is the source of form, always preceding it and imbuing it with meaning, form without content (as if that were ... See more

Call-out Instagram accounts like Diet Prada flourished despite contributing nothing more than public complaints about designers’ failures to adhere to the Current Thing; fashion stopped being fun.