Meaningful Design

Many people who have been around it for a majority of their life love to talk about how outdated and old anthroposophical design is, which to me is interesting because they seem to be completely ignorant of other perspectives; and yes i know that is quite a strong statement but i'll elaborate;

So to preface this; am a designer. I know other designers. I know how big design firms operate and how they make decisions relating to design. The people who think "Let's modernize! We're going to change our logo and branding from unique to a modern, minimalist style so we can fit in with the times and stand out!" really confuse me. A few things;

  • If you fit in you by definition don't stand out.
  • Any designer or consultant worth paying won't ever tell you "yep okay we need to get RID of all links to past context, designs, art, branding, and we also need to stop using all prior design and artistic principles, ideas, and visual styles used by you before" because it's almost always a part of your history, people already associate it with you, and there's almost certainly a reason for it being like that; so if you abandon that style, you're essentially rejecting whatever principles your organisation was created with, literally all previous success that came from the prior branding, and, in the case of anthroposophical design, you're rejecting a wildly unique and distinguishable (but still every use of it is unique) international style which links an entire movement that thousands of organisations are part of.
  • Anthroposophical design really is modern. Many people just don't get this, but if you actually look at it it's sharp, uses colours in highly specific contexts, text is readable (and also min many cases it's sans-serif) and the shapes are cool, interesting, and have a reason for being the way they are. If you look at some of the buildings Steiner designed, it literally looks like he used blender to make them over a hundred years before blender would be created.

Anthroposophical design doesn't necessarily mean that the main font always has to be Baar Antropos or FF Liant, i think it can be way more than people give it credit for. And maybe i'll go deeper into that in another article.

But essentially if you remove anthroposophical design from where it was before, what you're essentially doing is removing meaning and context which is important for customers or visitors or equivilent to understand you, and is also important for you, your organisation, whatever it was that uses it, because it's an important and unique cultural thing.

But anthroposophical art, and therefore design, because design is basically just art, is not meant to mean things; it is meant to be things.

It Literally Does Things

This is where it gets interesting;

Of course everything means something, though meaning is kind of subjective, when people see modern art and think "what's this supposed to mean?" in a critical way, they can say this because meaning is so subjective that anyone can make it up and if it's not in a serious spiritual context, meaning doesn't have to have anything to do with reality; any meaning can be "assigned" in a very loose way to anything, which is an easy way to cause outrage because of how obvious it is that the meaning has no link to the actual thing. Anyway.