New Age VS Graphic Design
Since my childhood, I’ve been surrounded by spiritual people: my mother, my friends, doctors even. I guess our family always had a thing for the « beyond », the idea of forces greater than us, like nature herself, unpredictable energies, some kind of god-like figure even. We’ve always assumed we were living in a world of mysteries, strangeness and many ways to cherish life and reflect upon it. Anyone has their beliefs, I’m not even sure about mine, but I know I’ve lived among a family of spiritual-oriented people. I often joke about the fact that we’re « New Age » because of our fascination for alternative medicine, weirdos hugging trees and the randomness that happens everyday in life. I might not be full New Age myself, hell, I refuse to cure a headache with a brew of plants with latin-only names or spend an hour saying « thank you » to the sun every morning, but the fact is, I’ve been influenced by this philosophy. And as everything is visual, I’ve seen a lot of business cards, flyers, posters and signs from this New Age crowd, and boy is it ugly.
As I entered Graphic Design, I started noticing my graphic surroundings more and more, and eventually, judging them based on my personal likings and my ongoing graphic education. Then, I received a new year’s greeting card from a magnetizer that I had seen once or twice, a wonderful witchy woman who actually helped me a lot during troubled times, and I got slightly shocked by the card’s design. Even though I knew most new age stuff is often too layered, too colorful, and more often than not displays pixelized drawings of angels, pixies or Hindu symbols, the card reminded me of all the imagery i had seen so often in New Age businesses. This imagery is composed of rainbows, yin and yangs, chakras and planets, sunsets over the beach, eyes in the milky way, lotus flowers, the papyrus font, Jesus in the stars, aliens and hippie randomness. Yes, it’s too much. But it’s, in fact, this too-much-ness IS what qualifies the New Age graphic landscape and, actually, the New Age philosophy itself.
New Age is a spiritual movement made of many, many, many other spiritual movements. Its roots are numerous, from Catholicism to Hinduism, from the sayings of Albert Einstein to those of the Dalai Lama, from the teachings of marxism to those of the Chinese traditional medicine. It is, in fact, a melting pot of so many influences that its visual expression is a reflection of this jumble mess of a « love thy neighbor » philosophy. All these ideas and teachings are parked under one flag: « live better, in harmony, in the world ». But visually, it seem all about discord and over-doing it and trying too hard, like mixing a bunch of different alcohols into a colorful cocktail and regretting it the next morning when you get a headache and you just yearn for clear, clean, still water to wash all the bad decisions away.
But as you can see now, there’s a very real reason why New Age aesthetics is so much: as the basis of the philosophy is a mix of many beliefs and lifestyles, it eventually transpires in their design. Plus, more often than not, these designs are made by the business/practice-owners, because New Age is the kind of thinking that, honorably I must say, praises creativity and encourages it for everyone. Therefore, designing New Age is essentially an amateur thing, which is interesting, but can also lead to a very strange and hard-to-look-at result. As New Age practice-owners fashion their own designs, they’re drawn to expressing and showing everything they believe in, whether it be gnomes, the Virgin Mary or reincarnation, and to mixing all of this with symbols of happiness (colours for example), open-mindedness (galaxies, lasers) and well-being (stock photos of women smiling, men doing yoga in front of a sunset and so-on). Those symbols are inherent to New Age philosophy, and have been accepted in the field through reiteration to become some kind of a convention without even questioning their accuracy, which makes New Age graphic design even more « bazaric ». Mixing and melting ideas together makes for strange designs, and even stranger practices. But New Age businesses deserve good designs, and it is a field that shouldn’t be so ignored in favor of culture or advertising, because it is ever-so expanding and getting a strong follow-ship, but also because it is recent and evidently like a blank canvas on which anything can be imagined. Designing for New Age should be taken seriously, and, in my opinion, can be the holy grail of projects: imagining an open-mind, with no restrictions, a way to convey a lot of ideas into one design, would be a great challenge, wouldn’t it? All is left is for the New Age crowd to call on graphic designers and begin a collaboration… I’ll be standing by the phone.
