Thoughts on "Urban Chic"

Posting from Paradise

This is what I call the new trend in sbing. From what I can tell it consists of photos of 20-30 somethings, or their girlfriends and themselves (I do a lot of these but all my gfs tend to be in the 40-50 bracket), or their small children.(we either don't have kids or they are grown) It requires great photography (I'm marginal here), a good knowledge of photo manipulation and/or computer graphics (even less than marginal here for me).

Lots of these are done on either white or black backgrounds. If it were not for the seemingly random selection of strips of patterned paper and the carefully planned placement of a photot or a few to "look" haphazard, I'd say it is a return to the CM style.

I love the organized chaos of these layouts but often find it hard to follow the journaling or to identify a focal point on the layout. I rally like the mixed typographics in the print too.

While I like many of the los I see in this "Urban Chic" movement, I am seeing too many of them. It was like Shabby Chic...one did it, everyone did it. It is almost like a layout must have a measure of these ingredients along with some machine stitching and some doodling freestyle to get published. If I can see hundreds of these on-line, why would I buy a sb mag that publishes little else but these also.

We are human lemmings following the most popular trend of the time, often even it is not "us". I give almost everything a shot and have tried this a time or two. While I like many of the elements, it is not me. Back to scrapping for old broads!