Notes on rough edges

Something has shifted in the last year. I'm not sure when it started, but I notice it everywhere now: the slight asymmetry in a logo grid that used to be perfect. The hand-drawn arrow on a title slide. A texture file someone left in the background. The colour that's almost wrong.

For most of the 2010s, design was about removing things. We polished, kerned, gridded, smoothed. The platonic ideal was a wireframe rendered in flat colours — crisp, frictionless, "clean." Anything that wasn't cleanness was a draft on the way to cleanness.

I think we're done with that.

WHERE I'M SEEING IT

Three places, off the top of my head.

Studio identity work that intentionally breaks its own grid. The newer rebrands aren't perfecting a system — they're letting the system flex. A monogram that rotates at three different angles. Wordmarks where the kerning visibly drifts. It feels human in a way that the past decade's "design system" branding never quite did.

Music posters and small-label work. The texture is back. Over-printed colour. Photocopier artefacts. I've been looking at a lot of recent gig posters out of London and Tokyo and the move is the same — you can see the printing process in the final image.

Web design that admits the page is being made of code. Buttons with slightly off-centre labels. Margins that aren't perfectly halved. Type that lives one click larger than the system would suggest. Sites where the navigation does something slightly weird on hover. Not weird enough to break — just weird enough to remind you a person made this.

WHAT IT'S NOT

It's not a return to "ugly design." Ugly design is a posture. This is more careful than that.

It's also not chaos. Underneath, the work is still tightly built — colour, hierarchy, type, all decided. The roughness isn't slack. It's an edit that someone left in on purpose.

The closest reference is probably how a film looks when the colourist stops grading the shadows so aggressively. Everything still works. It just feels less corporate.

WHY I THINK IT'S RIGHT

The flat, perfect, design-system aesthetic was a useful mode for a moment. It scaled. It was easy to maintain. It worked across thirty languages and twelve product surfaces. And then everyone copied it, and now the world's visual culture has been smoothed flat for a decade.

You can feel people reaching for friction again. Not for nostalgia, but for legibility — the kind of legibility where a piece of work tells you it was made by a particular person at a particular moment with particular hands. A slightly off corner does that.

I don't know how long this turn lasts. Probably someone is already writing the post-rough-edges essay. But for now I'll keep noting the small wrong things I see, because they're usually the most right.