Posted on September 10, 2019 by lipsum123
The post “Keeping up with trends – A zero sum game?” written by Lipsum 123, discusses the importance of following trend when you are a designer. The writer illustrates his arguments with a concrete example: Holzweiler siblings and one of their main competitors, Acne Studio, on how they deal with the sustainable trend that’s arising nowadays.
The post’s title is catchy and matches the blog written style. In my opinion, asking a rhetorical question is a good way to draw the reader’s attention. However, it could be more efficient if it was more precise. By reading the title “Keeping up with trends – A zero sum game?” you don’t know what the text main subject is going to be. It’s not obvious that the post will be related to design.
The blog post uses a definition of a designer as a starting point “Being a designer is about expressing your own creativity”. Then he discusses the positive and negative aspects of following trends: “keeping up with trends could be a positive thing and also lead to increased popularity”; “if you just try to copy the trends it’s no longer about your style, but more about someone else’s”. I think these statements could have made more impact linked to the syllabus. It would have made sense to relate that part with the 10 commandments in Design by Dieter Rams, especially with the innovative, honest and environmentally friendly.
In a second time, the writer gives the successful Holzweiler sibling example as a model of equilibrium between following the trend and having their own signature patterns. The example chosen is clear, well explained and it resonates to the reader. Then the writer talks about sustainability and define it as a trend “Sustainability is a huge trend today”, but also as a responsibility for the designer “Because of this the responsibility that comes with being a designer has grown a lot”. In my opinion, it’s interesting to mention sustainability in a blog post because it’s a current problematic that everyone feel concern about. Why not link this part to the new roles circle from The design experience: the role of design and designers in the twenty-first Century, Rachel Cooper. In order to show that nowadays, being a sustainable entrepreneur is more than a trend, it’s one of the roles and responsibility of a designer.
Then, the writer comes along with Holzweiler’s competitor, Acne Studio. It’s nice to mention the competition background and allow the reader to get a wider perspective of the topic. However, I think this part is unclear, we want to go further and know more. For example, when he says “according to proff.no, Holzweiler has a better turnover than Acne Studios – there could be a million reasons for this difference.” We would appreciate to have concrete example that explain why Holzweiler have a better turnover than Acne Studio.
From an overall point of view, the text could be improved by going more into depth, both in term of length and connecting to the syllabus. Indeed, it’s quite short, the writer doesn’t reach the 500 words, and he does not use the theories from the syllabus efficiently. Finally, I would like to say that the subject chosen was meaningful and explained in an efficient way that facilitate the reader to understand the topic.
Making sense of art and design industries 