Revue Faire n°45 — Made Redundant

Templates in graphic design are usually associated with convenience and efficiency, their dual purpose being to speed up work by circumventing the need to make decisions, and to ensure consistency by restricting the parameters of possibility. But they can be deployed in less reductive, more enterprising ways too. This essay recounts the development of four projects made with various collaborators, each involving a very particular template conceived in such a spirit. Classified here as the “Generative Headache”, the “Meeting Point”, the “Happy Medium”, and the “Industry Default”, these four types trace the gradual shift from physical to digital media over the last couple of decades.