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Comment by daveslash | Hacker News Reader

When I look at older magazines, photos, billboards, and advertisements -- today's world of media is so much more colorful and vibrant than it was in the 60s & 70s. E.g. This [0] vs. this [1].

With the race to the bottom for generating high-quality, scalable, rich and colorful illustrations at almost no cost in massive quantities, I'm envisioning the world is about to get even more colorful and vibrant.

[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0050/4252/files/carros_ant...

[1] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MzMrYtY_Ooo/US_iZSd3noI/AAAAAAABC...

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Counterpoint: BYTE Magazine artwork (1980s) compared to macabre SVG libraries of wavy modular body parts stitched together to show human activity.

[0]: https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bytecover.jp...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Co...

It seems to me that at one point people were fed-up with vibrant style of 90s. Reaction was minimalism and later flat design and Corporate Memphis.

Now the pendulum is swinging back.

Race to the bottom is only when it comes to wages.

Companies are making profits not seen before.

We had a blip in the history where everyone could participate in the economy - from building prototype in a garage to becoming relatively wealthy.

Now we have wage slavery and access to market gatekeeped by VC and banks.

Not a great future.

I won't argue with you that they have gotten more colorful, but I feel like they've also lost a lot of originality as well. Advertising in the 60s and 80s seemed more fun and witty, and you had commercial artists like Andy Warhol giving ads a wholly unique style, despite the limitations of the craft back then.

Nowadays, we have Corporate Memphis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis).

Funny really. Despite creative tooling opening up new possibilities, I see the end result as a net loss in quality. Cheap generally wins out over great.

Ever the optimist, I like remind myself that in a world where good loses out to mediocre every single time, it's easier to stand out for being great.

Alright so why's your first example look so much more colorful to me?

You're right. I think I chose the wrong terms with colorful/vibrant. Perhaps better words would have been busy/detailed/intricate/textured.

These older advertisements might have as much color, but they're pleasing in their simplicity. Even a solid color can be bright and beautiful, but it's not nearly as busy as a collection of overlapping gradients. I walk back my use of the word color in favor of the word busy. Thank you for pointing that out.

> With the race to the bottom for generating high-quality, scalable, rich and colorful illustrations at almost no cost in massive quantities, I'm envisioning the world is about to get even more colorful and vibrant.

Counterpoint: The world may get "more colorful and vibrant", but also it will go toward uniform styles as AI will take all the commercial high-paying jobs and leave all but zero opportunities for actual artists.

I'm not sure it's commercial high-paying so much. If you're going to do a rebrand, you're still going to hire an agency that will fuss with the tiniest details.

At least initially, the impact will probably be more on the type of thing that even a junior designer can do in their sleep but is a lot harder for someone who isn't a designer to do.

Even pretty routine graphics and illustrations for books and presentations are pretty hard for the average person to do by themselves and there's often no budget to have someone else, whether internal or external to a company, to do them. Tools have improved a lot in the past few decades but it still takes a degree of talent to produce even routine polished work.

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