Critical Daily    Critical practice in graphic design

Social media is a big part of everyone’s lives nowadays. It provides online platform great for small creators to show their work or communicate their ideas with the world. Projects can become global and inspire many others instantly. On the other hand, everything is in the now, constantly seeking innovation and looking to the future, so it can become very consuming and one is easily caught up in the social media whirlwind all the time.

This newness also kind of prevents ideas to flourish further as the evolution is fast and person has to concentrate on the next best thing rather than to develop his own approach. This can be very exhausting to maintain and often leads people to not being able to keep up with the pace and sliding into passivity, feelings of jealousy, tiredness and boredom. They end up scrolling through endless visual stimuli for hours, often under the pretense of „searching for inspiration“ and end up doing nothing else.

I have noticed loss of creative energy and motivation in many people around me. They often complain that they feel no motivation to come up with anything new as it immediately gets lost in the sea of other creative work. We live in the picture era, where one photograph is all you’ve got to tell your story, so feeling over-flooded with visuals is anatural reaction. One-hit-wonder projects are what rules the world and everyone strives to get viral to gain attention. Many of these projects lack any depth of meaning though and it makes me sad to see people giving up their time to consume such content. It also strikes me how easy it is to get influenced by social media and how people that are actually creators of the content themselves fall into their own traps and get so discouraged.

In my project, Iwanted to target my direct surroundings through Instagram. This platform is quite popular amongst my peers to gain recognition and search for inspiration. I have created aseries of mini-posters for instastories that would use recent trends without any extra composition or depth. I wanted them to carry the idea of boredom and easy passive entertainment that these stories provide for us daily. I wanted to address the quantity of poorly-made visuals that bombard our senses on daily basis and take up our rare free time we could spend doing proper research and work on our own projects instead. Ihave published three posters per day and approximately 45 people per day have seen them. There was no direct reaction or open discussion with me, except for one classmate asking if this was a school project. The rest of the audience passively consumed the content and moved on.

Maybe we should all reconsider if we spend our free time for our best and be attentive to how much the passive consumption of random visuals affects our creative process.