Exciting and innovative, anti-design is the experimental approach that encourages designers to banish conformity and embrace a little chaos.
In this article, discover how anti-design can bring edge and energy to your web, graphic design, and branding projects, and why it’s one of the most effective design strategies for marketing campaigns. Read on to find out more about anti-design, and pick up tips for integrating this exciting approach into your own designs.
We’ll cover:
Scroll to the end of the article to read a simple tutorial for creating a social media ad using Shutterstock Create. We’ll look at how you can integrate eccentric anti-design elements into your ad, while ensuring the final design retains clarity for the viewer.
At the end of this article, read a simple tutorial for how to create an Instagram ad with anti-design elements, using Shutterstock Create.
What Is Anti-Design?
Although the term sounds negative, anti-design is actually about open-mindedness and taking an expansive approach to designing.
Graphic designers are often felt to be bound by a seemingly inexhaustible list of rules, from using a grid-based layout to selecting tasteful typography.
Anti-design is about throwing the rule book out the window and, instead, adopting a design approach that takes “why not?”—rather than “do not”—as its driving question.
Although the visual styles of anti-design are incredibly diverse and eclectic, as the approach is generally in reaction to overly-simplistic design, the result is almost always loud, messy, maximalist, and brimming with references to the early days of the internet, urban grunge, and elements considered to be “bad taste” in minimalist contexts.
Anti-design is a reactionary design approach, meaning that it always manifests itself in ways that oppose the mainstream design consensus.
Chaos, collage, and (lack of) clarity is all in a day’s work for anti-design. License these images via local_doctor, Vanzyst, and Diego Schtutman.
For example, minimalism became the widely-accepted design style in the 1990s, with stark, white layouts and clean type being the order of the day.
Graphic designer David Carson spearheaded a reactionary design movement, now known as Experimental Typography, which was heavily influenced by the counter-culture grunge scene emerging in music and fashion.
The result was an eclectically-collaged and grid-free approach to designing layouts in his art-directed magazine Ray Gun.
Just as Carson sparked an anti-design movement then, today designers face the same challenge of conformist design.
We’re faced with a sea of ultra-simple digital designs, tailored to UX design and an efficiency-first user journey, making the internet a rather bland and sanitized place to inhabit.
We’re driven to click as quickly as possible, with simplistic layouts aiding the process.
For the anti-designer, the idea that we would interact with a design simply to click a button or scan a QR code is belittling to the potential of design. Anti-design forces us to reconsider the goals of design, be it to inspire, shock, spark discussion, or galvanize further design experimentation.
What Are the Benefits of Anti-Design for Designers, Brands, and Consumers?
This experimental approach is all well and good, you might say, but what does it actually do for my designs and campaigns?
Anti-design has a wide range of potential benefits for designers and brands who are willing to experiment. First off, because anti-design is reactive and non-conformist, it instantly stands out and commands attention from the viewer.
Rather than shock advertising (shockvertising), which risks poor audience reception and backlash, anti-design is more about using unexpected visual elements, making it unusual but not exploitative.
Anti-design can pick up on a wide range of alternative creative influences—punk, comic strips, fine art, techno music. Clockwise from top-left: Mononke cover artboard by Koah Phung. 23.08.22 – 00:13 am – ANTI DESIGN by Nahuel Bustamante and poster design by Ewelina Kotra.
Anti-design’s non-conformity also contributes to improved memorability for the viewer. This can be particularly valuable for new brands looking to cut through the clutter of the advertising market, or established businesses looking to do a one-off marketing campaign to test a new product or reach a new audience.
For example, a long-established sports brand might choose to use anti-design to reach a market they’re less familiar with, such as a younger demographic or an audience who would otherwise not consider them as a brand they would normally purchase from.
As well as its advantages for marketers, anti-design is also exceptionally rewarding for the designer in terms of its potential for enhanced creativity and experimentation. Anti-design can reference the novel, nostalgic, or artistic, and its execution can be as varied and unusual as the designer desires.
It’s this spirit of creative freedom that allows anti-design to stray towards the realm of art. In anti-design, commerciality is still present, but it takes a sideline to creative experimentation, making it a rewarding experience for creativity-starved designers.
In summary, the advantages of anti-design are:
- It allows your design to stand out amongst competing brands and designs.
- Its non-conformity promotes memorability of the design.
- Anti-design can provoke discussions, leading to a better chance of a viral campaign, as well as galvanizing further design experimentation.
- Anti-design is an exceptionally creative design strategy, giving designers more creative fulfillment.
What Are the Limitations of Anti-Design?
There are a number of reasons why anti-design is more rarely seen than other design approaches. For one thing, conformity is comforting, and there are many benefits to staying within the lines, observing current trends, and subtly reproducing what is considered to be “good design.”
In some contexts more than others, being more conformist in a design approach is advantageous, or even necessary, such as in more formal or corporate contexts, or in information services, such as government, health or medical websites.
In these cases, chaotically breaking the grid will only serve to damage the user experience, as the overall goal of the design is to provide essential information as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Because anti-design often favors chaotic and busy layouts, the approach can compromise accessibility, making websites, in particular, more difficult to navigate. Because the goal of anti-design is to present something different and visually interesting, the intended user journey can be unclear, which means that you may be sacrificing click rates for memorability.
Anti-design also runs the considerable risk that viewers simply don’t like it. As the styles used are non-conventional, the majority of viewers won’t be acclimatized to anti-design and may find the result off-putting.
Of course, this can dramatically achieve an opposite, positive response if the audience you’re looking to reach is already open to alt-culture, or non-conventional attitudes in design.
And, a final word of caution for big brands hoping to jump on the anti-design bandwagon. Consumers are wary of big businesses masquerading as independent, “down-with-the-kids” brands, so be aware that an anti-design strategy might backfire in a corporate or established-brand context.
So, anti-design does have its limitations. And, in summary, its drawbacks can include:
- Its lack of applicability for essential information designs, which require simplicity and functionality.
- Anti-design can compromise accessibility and confuse the user journey.
- It can be stylistically off-putting because of its non-conventionality.
- It can backfire in big brand contexts, and damage established consumer trust.
How to Use Anti-Design in Your Projects
Here, we’ll look at how you can create a social media post that uses anti-design strategies to capture and hold a viewer’s attention. In this example, we’ll create a series of ads for Instagram that use an eclectic design style to encourage viewers to click across to a retailer’s website.
You’ll learn how to integrate anti-design elements into your ads, as well as tips for fine-tuning the levels of experimentation and simplicity, creating a layout that will still work for social media.
We’ll use online app Shutterstock Create to put one of these quirky post designs together. Don’t worry if you’ve not used it before, it’s very intuitive for beginners!
Top Tips for Using Anti-Design Elements in Your Marketing and Branding Projects
As we’ve discussed above, anti-design offers an unexpected element of surprise and can help your campaigns stand out in an ad-saturated online environment.
However, to make anti-design more palatable for a consumer audience, it’s best to dial down the messiness and make a more sleek and stylish reference to anti-design.
It also helps to increase the amount of white space in your design, and direct attention to one focal point. As social media images are seen by the viewer in such a brief amount of time, it’s important that the CTA or message of your anti-design ad can be instantly processed.
In the example Instagram ad design below, we’ll look at how to incorporate grunge collage textures, eclectic typography, and nostalgic ’90s elements into a layout for social media that feels authentic and edgy, without compromising on clarity.
Step 1
Go to Shutterstock Create and choose Instagram Post from the blank canvas options. In the window that opens, click on Images > Stock Photos and search for a side portrait of an individual. An image with a white or non-cluttered background will be easier to use.
Click to drop your chosen image onto the canvas before scaling the portrait to fit centrally on the layout.
Click on Pro effects along the top control panel, and choose the first Glitch effect, clicking Apply.
Step 2
You can add nostalgic ’90s elements to your anti-design ad with graphics. Go to Graphics > Basic, and scroll down to the Stars section. Click on one of the star shapes and position this over the subject’s head.
Adjust the color of the star to a bright neon, such as #26f0e8. With the star shape selected, click on Fade & blend at top-right, setting the Blend mode to Lighten.
Head back to Images > Stock Photos, and this time search for a grunge torn paper texture, such as this one.
Drop the image onto the canvas, using the Erase tool to remove the right side of the texture, revealing the portrait below. Then from Fade & blend, set the Blend mode of the paper image to Hardlight.
Add more star shapes to the corner of the design from the Graphics > Basic selection.
Step 3
As a final touch, you can bring in the name of the brand or product to the right side of the ad design from the Text option. Use a quirky font like VT323 to make the design feel more ’90s and digitized.
Step 4
Now that you have the template for your ad design, you can work off duplicate copies (File > Edit a copy) and simply swap in the principle image.
In this example, I adjust this ad slide to have an image of the product.
If the product image has a background, click Remove background at top-left.
Apply a Glitch effect to the image from the Pro Effects options. When you’ve finished working on all of your ads, go to Publish at the top-right of the workspace to post to your social media account.
And there we have it, a series of social media designs that can be used as posts or ads, all with an edgy (yet legible) anti-design style!
