35 Unorthodox Ways to Embrace ‘Ugly’ Design Edit

Impeccably fabricated tables are turning and the design world is encouraging ugliness. An article recently written by Core 77’s Tad Toulis, a designer himself, suggests that we may be suffocating from good design.

Not that a beautifully shaped bath faucet isn’t a thing to behold, but as Toulis says, “By degrees this pursuit of beauty has gradually been replaced with the much more predictable and less admirable accomplishment of achieving ‘pretty’.” In other words… boring.

Designers should look outside of the rigorously followed rule of ‘form follows function’ and embrace ‘ugly.’ Doing this could, as Toulis adds, “...serve to liberate design and design thinking, expediting the introduction of new voices and ideas that might stimulate and revitalize the practice of design.”

We’ve seen a number of unorthodox creations on Trend Hunter and I reiterate, this cluster is NOT a collection of ugliness—it is rather a cutting-edge series of visionary design.