The Tyranny of the Default

Its difficult to talk about virtual tyranny when real tyranny is knocking on the country’s door — if its not already made itself very comfortable in our favorite chair.

But this feels relevant to me as I think more about being a creative person with no creative practice. I feel as though mentoring others and directing others has left me with no creativity of my own. I also know that is probably not true, and just my pessimistic tendencies talking, but it feels true. So I have been thinking about creativity a bunch lately, and wondering if my own reliance on “best practice” and the apparent restrictions of digital accessibility have become a way for me to avoid being truly creative.

This article goes into the birth of Arial as a cost-cutting copy of a more popular and premium typeface, Helvetica. And then how it becomes the default typeface people choose by not choosing because it was part of the Windows OS. Further, two decades later, it is the default font of Google Docs, as if they cloned everything from Word including its poor choice in typography. So there you go — a default non-choice becomes the starting point for a possibly creative idea that is less creative because it doesn’t assume the default choice needs to become a conscious one.

When any standard becomes too easy to repeat, it replaces the choices someone would have to make for themselves. Twitter Bootstrap comes to mind, and how it was the default look and feel for many new websites in the early 2010s. Many engineering team used it to get their product to look “good enough” without having to deal with an eccentric designer. Those that had vision knew they would eventually need a designer to create something bespoke, but many others used this communization of “good” design as a step they can now skip over.

Defaults are designed to be invisible. That invisibility is exactly why they’re powerful. Every time you accept Arial without question, you participate in the great flattening of culture. You signal that “good enough” is good enough, that cutting corners is acceptable, that sameness is safety.

Luckily for me, I already made the choice long ago to customize my Google Docs font preferences. It was easy. But now I have to work on the harder parts of choosing the more difficult and creative paths when it comes to other decisions.