Last week I wrote a guest post over at The Lounge Group’s blog, on what I call the ‘Rise of the Digital Scrapbook culture’.
I’ve started to notice a trend among creative/visual types that I think reflects a wider shift towards a more visual culture. When was the last time you screengrabbed something from a blog? Saved an image you found, or several, into various folders, or even just littered your desktop with visual research?
It’s becoming second nature to create this informal ‘digital scrapbook’. Blogs are a great example of a continual stream of consciousness – people screengrab and save images in a split second decision, to inspire them and to come back to later.
An instantaneous facebook “Like” attitude has influenced this new generation of designers and consumers who respond instinctively to personal choice, and are now reducing many decisions to a single binary reponse – ‘Like’ or ignore. We now respond to content in the most basic sense and quickly absorb messages. Images and information are posted and reposted, tweeted, retweeted and reappropriated in a never-ending search for ‘the new’ or the next, often in the quickest medium possible.
From the series ‘The tree of knowledge of good and evil’ by Elvira Barriga
Click here to read the whole article - I really enjoyed writing it and it’s a subject which I’ve been dwelling a lot on recently. What is the future of the humble sketchbook? Will it eventually be swallowed by it’s digital counterpart. Vintage ephemera is alive and well, as are it’s collectors – the never-ending fascination with vintage has seen to that. But what of what will become future ephemera? The creation of physical memories right now that will become vintage in the future? If everything we create – photos, letters, diaries, drawings, illustrations, can all now be done in a purely physical sense – what will we hold onto in the future?
“The Lounge Group started in January 2004 when James Layfield and Sara Gil saw a niche for a different sort of agency specialising in helping brands to get in touch with under 35s. At the heart of this new enterprise was a network of under 35 year olds who were used as an information resource to tap into the target audience mindset delivering more effective marketing campaigns.”
