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DEAR C MAG,

Thank you for highlighting so many smart, alternative design practices that have nothing at all to do with that already mile-high stack of slick-looking photo-lifestyle magazines that drain my soul and make me question the role of publishing.

In respect to Chris Lee and Ali S. Qadeer’s question, “how graphic design as a visual practice gives form to power,” I couldn’t help but think of the many artists and micro-publishers I know working around me today (many of them, internet-savvy millennials) whose practices are similarly involved in calling out the design industry’s obvious complicity with the status quo. What’s different about these practices, though, is that most often they take a playful and/or ironic approach to this warfare—one that, in its self-consciously “bad” design, takes into account our own roles as consumers and purveyors of trends.

The bad design design trend. In short, bad design is everything that no client (outside of the art world that is!) would ever, ever want.