CR Blog

It’s one of the astonishing work of Kate Moross.

From a critic’s point of view-I think she’s a great illustrator, but I don’t think she’s anything ground-breaking. I can’t understand why everyone’s making a big meal about her when there so many ‘nu-rave’, gig-type illustrators around, some of whom are better. Lots of people have been playing with isometrics, retro, felt-tip, computer and crazy illustrations for ages.

She just happens to have come at the right time when Nu Rave, cute colourful things (see amount of plush toys, cartoony illustrations and quirky, colourful, adorable things on television) and gigs are in fashion all over again among teenagers. The fact that she’s so famous at such a young stage in her career is very much attributed to her Camberwell School status and therefore, connections and opportunities. Although I admire her hard work and self-promotion with the gig posters all over London.

Mmm that’s my opinion of Kate Moross’s work. I hope she’ll come up with more original things now she’s got lots of connections.

The Empresses new clothes.

You guys should listen to Tsubasa-Chan, besides ed-banger were the purveyors of this design trend. A couple of years ago it was all mock 70’s and butterflies, now we’re onto the 80’s are we? and someone has been blessed with the gift of reproducing 80’s graphics? what happens when we get to reproducing the next decades? ‘oh dear we were too busy mocking the previous decades so we have nothing to base our style on’. Designers should be more concerned with doing something innovative irrespective of current trends, or is design simply becoming a by-product of music trends?

I don’t think the point is whether she is good or not. She is talented and good at what she does but why they hell cant we innovate anymore? why are we stuck in a process of replicating design from 20 years ago. Too much nostalgia and not enough innovation!!

All Kate is doing is creating designs that will appeal to people of her generation. Yes, maybe she’s regurgitating styles from some 20/30 years ago, but there’s no point in her designing, say, a ‘metal’ poster for a ‘nu-rave’ gig, because it simply wouldn’t work. If you were going to see Klaxons, which I presume most of you critics haven’t, you would expect to see something similar to Kate’s work just because it’s a convention of that specific music genre. What is ‘trendy’ nowadays is no fault of Kate’s, she’s simply grown up in this era and designed things based around what’s happebed at the time and what’s influenced her. If you look at the world from the point of view of a teenager, people who listen to Klaxons and this poorly dubbed ‘nu-rave’ are the minority and not the majority. They may appear to be the majority if you’re living in London, where people are more open-minded etc, but if you venture further afield then you’d find that there are only a handful in each town. ‘Nu-rave’ is actually fairly uncool and is mainly driven by mindless 14 year olds who can’t think for themselves, and therefore listen to anything NME tells them to listen to.

Another point, particularly aimed at ‘wally’, it’s only nostalgic to you because you’ve been there and seen it before, us teenagers haven’t. And, lets be honest, you’re not exactly going to be the target audience for Topshop or NME.