If I’m being honest, I don’t find myself in the natural world much these days. I most of my days are spent commuting to school and back to Burien. The most amount of nature I’ve been getting these days is seeing the sunset. The sky is never pure anymore though, there is always as plane landing or taking off from Tacoma International. Everytime I see the planes I think about how much exhaust and carbon is spewing out from their exhaust. Then I think about all the cars on the road and the oncoming wildfire season and about the inevitable march of society. How can we stop this system? There’s simply no way. We could never conceivably stop all the unnecessary flights that slowly kill this planet. We are on an unsteerable path to destruction, but I think there can be beauty in that destruction.
It’s a round about way of saying I think the same can be found in branding and business. So much unnecessary destruction just to sell shirts or shoes or whatever. my job is going to be to actively participating in that. There’s no way around it. at the same time, there’s something beautiful in that. You could say marketing is evil and pessimistic, or maybe even overly saccharine. You could say it’s a leech on culture or you could say it unduly influences culture. The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. More than that, it’s an encapsulation of our zeitgeist. It is a collection of all our wants and fears and everything else. Sure, it’s a little bit of a fun house mirror reflection, but it’s a lot closer to the truth than I think we’d like to admit.
Lately I’ve been thinking about branding and identity creation. It would all be pretty easily summarized by Hans-Georg Moeller’s idea of profilicity. Here’s a quick summary from chatgpt: “Profilicity, as conceptualized by Hans-Georg Moeller, challenges the notion of fixed and stable individual identity. It suggests that in our complex and interconnected world, identity is fluid and fragmented, shaped by various social and cultural factors. Profilicity highlights the evolving nature of selfhood, emphasizing the need to embrace and navigate the multiplicity of identities that individuals embody in different contexts and relationships.” I don’t have a lot of intelligent things to say on that, but I think it will be an important idea in my conceptualization of Graphic Design and branding.
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