Out of Context
I spend way too much time browsing internet. Especially looking at different design blogs and people’s portfolios. I’ve developed a nice little hobby out of it; in fact I’ve become a virtual collector of other designer’s work. To do this I’m using a website called ffffound!, which is a pretty handy image bookmarking site. Many people use the site to bookmark cool things they like, such as photography, illustration or interior design. Since this is internet we are talking about there is of course also…ermmph…porn.
My collection isn’t about porn; it consists of mainly printed matter and nice typographic design. Looking back of my bookmarked images from the past five years they definitely form an inspiring source of creative work and reflect my visual taste. However I started to wonder that maybe creating a collection like that has also negative sides as well.
Graphic design as a profession is often defined as the act of creating visual communication. In order to communicate the right meaning, a piece of work should be viewed in it’s original context. Internet portfolios and blogs often lack totally an explanation of the context the work has originally been created. My ffffound! collection isn’t an exception, on the contrary it’s actually even making it worse; All the images of other people’s work is ripped of as a piece of eye candy, without offering any explanation for the projects. If I look it like that, it sounds quite selfish, doesn’t it? Well, this is how internet works, the content is usually available for everyone to use as they wish.
Going back to the things you find at ffffound! I mentioned porn – the king of internet. My friend says that on ffffound! you are always one click away from porn. And porn if what, is a piece of visual stimulation without any proper content – and it’s usually totally out of context. Could I then state that my collection of graphic design images are also porn as they seem to tick the same boxes? They function as pure visual stimulation. So have I accidently turned graphic design into visual pornography?
Out of Context is a book where I have explored this now introduced thought. I have taken graphic design works from my archive and merged them with pornographic content (also taken from ffffound!), in order to create visually stunning – but totally meaningless images.
