Super Stimuli

With the recent release of We Love Typography I've been thinking about the shift in the way that we receive design content (and content more generally). It's something that has been going on for some time, and is becoming more prevalent with the expansion of Web 2.0 I'm talking about cloud content. Gone are the days of a single author or 'blogger' deciding what users would like to read or see—now we can use sites like Buamai to channel our image searches into something more to our tastes. It also categorises according to colour, theme and shape. Add to that WLT, Tumblr and Twitter streams and we have an absolute abundance of content available for designer's to look at and enjoy. All of this sounds great in theory, but I think that we're missing something—a critical view. While blogging is a relatively new practice, it did allow for specialised content to flourish, and is why we have valuable resources like I Love Typography and The Strange Attractor, and gave designers a background on the pieces that passed before their eyes. I feel that for design to be successful it has to have context, otherwise it deviates from solution becomes mere image. That's why I worry about this shift—the amount of stuff I've learned about design over the internet is amazing, and it's a vital resource for Australian designers. If we lose this critical content on the net through our race to please all viewers, where will it come from? Certainly not from print, whose death has been long foretold and does not have the reach or impact of internet communication. Before we all jump on the bandwagon to user dictated content, I think we need to consider how we provide context and critique for the images that we choose to display.