The Apple brand comes quickly to mind when discussing the innate natural beauty of aesthetic design and how we interact with products and user interface that we encounter in everyday life. Apple gave us clean fonts, broad white backgrounds, product heroes, and simplicity in a world of visual chaos. Apple set the standard of beauty that the world could see, understand and emulate.
The same was true for others like Google, whose home page design set the bar for functional utility with its utter devotion to one simplistic task- a search bar that awaits your entry.
1998 was a big year for design. Apple launched its original iMac and Google debuted its iconic homepage. Average Americans without formal artistic or design training were exposed to this wave of great design in product and services. An innate sense of “good design” became more apparent and important to the masses.
This exposure and a celebration of great design became a topic of conversation in corporate boardrooms and with consumers alike. While many Americans may not have been able to verbalize the design principles behind their gut intuition, they “knew good design when they saw it.” We became a nation that understood the ability of "great design" to propel business and improve lives.
2017 changed all that when Snapchat introduced “World Lenses.” For those of you unfamiliar with Snapchat, think of the ability to place your Selfie into a Mario Bros. video game. It’s a scary place where dancing hotdogs, waterfalls of hearts and sparkling stars randomly appear, and people vomit rainbows while wearing dog face cartoon masks.
So where’s the harm in a little dysfunctional visual fun? Well it turns out that 158 million people are on Snapchat an average of 18 times a day placing hearts in their eyes and elongating their tongues. A generation of Millennials now solely communicates with one another by visual means - sharing silly facial exaggerations and flying OMG unicorns that puke rainbows and showers of stars.
From a cultural perspective, Snapchat alone has exposed a generation of young minds to the antithesis of design aesthetics, with massive daily doses of function-less visual chaos, where sparkles and glitter are showered upon us and cliché trite animated cartoon visual representations are repeated endlessly - until they become the accepted way we communicate, and hence, define "good” design.
A generation of Millennials is now growing up in a virtual world of visual chaos and mindless self-absorption. What Apple has given us – Snapchat has taken away.