Guruism and Brand Critique

It’s holiday season. This year I’m not upset because the Christians are big mad about red cups. I’m mad because the trapping on this cup is driving me nuts. See that section where the green emblem lightly bleeds into the red of the cup? :shudder:

Trapping is the printer’s technical term for getting solid colors to align and butt up against each other without bleeding into one another.

Printing with perfect registration (the aligning of printing plates to avoid trapping errors) is both an art, and a skilled trade. Excellent trapping requires a lot of thought and coordination but goes virtually unnoticed. Great printing is a collaboration between a designer and the pre-press team.

I want to believe this was an intentional design choice.

What does any of this have to do with eCom? We make intentional design choices every day that cause friction for the customer. But for those in the industry who have a particular skill it’s not a pot hole, it’s a spike strip that stops us dead in our tracks. We just can’t help ourselves but see the imperfections.

In the age of social media we transition from noticing the imperfection into using it as a platform for self-aggrandizement, disguised as informational content. This particular post offering suggestions on how to improve Kin Europhorics’ website sums up the type of guruism rampant on Twitter and LinkedIn.

“This brand’s message isn’t coming through” is a way of inserting ourselves into the story of the brand’s art. We interpret what the artist is trying to convey and relay to each other the purpose and message. This style of critique is venturing towards formal Criticism.

Art criticism is a mature industry that has divided itself into multiple disciplines, ranging from art history to the theory of beauty. As brands trend more towards art than commercial goods we see similar critique emerge. And in an era where the market is consolidating at both extremes of the maturity spectrum (mature DTC businesses and immature startups alike) we’re likely to have fewer choices in the marketplace to purchase. 

Which makes the historical context and critique that much more of a vain pursuit. 

We covered this in-depth in the Romanticism episode over on the Visions Pod if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole. 

In the meantime I’ll be over here obsessing about how Starbucks could possibly allow this cup to pass the print QA test. 

— Phillip