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Design Student's Orgasm - TV Tropes

  • ️Mon Oct 27 2008

Design Student's Orgasm (trope)

This is something of a fashionable and stylistic approach in visual media. Overwhelmingly, these designs are made with vector graphics, to create solid areas of colour with crisp, geometrically neat outlines. Usually involves vivid colours over a monochrome background (white has preference as a neutral colour, but it can easily be black). The colour patterns can also be switched for the negative space, while the solid colour becomes the foreground. It's easier to show than to describe, hence the picture. Look for examples of this rather abstract art in commercials and opening credits. In animated works, designs may flow outwards from a central point, gaining variety and complexity as they grow.

Peaked in popularity during the late 2000s, as part of a larger trend towards humanist, maximalist computer-aided graphic design in that decade. "Frutiger Metro" is an alternate term coined in the early 2020s.

Compare this visual trope to the literary-only Purple Prose and mostly-videogame Talkative Cover. Failure to maintain focus on the product can result in What Were They Selling Again? Video versions of this trope might employ Blipvert as well. Contrast Ascetic Aesthetic, Face on the Cover & Minimalistic Cover Art (although this can also be done in a very striking and artistic way). Might overlap with Made of Shiny (a product sells itself with just its looks).

Examples:

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Advertising 

  • This commercial from Microsoft describing what they think the future will be like has lots of computer screen images popping out all over the place.
  • This anime-style Louis Vuitton ad from Japan, starting at about 1:16, features a trippy world filled with colorful patterns.
  • A number of television commercials in the UK for HD TV sets use this trend, using "arty" graphics over a white background. Usually in slow motion and with a calming acoustic guitar soundtrack. The tag line usually being some variation of "look at this amazing image and how detailed it is in HD". Which is fine...unless you are watching in standard definition in which case it is no more detailed than any other ad.
  • An "a.s.i.c.s." sneakers commercial stars a jogger running through a drippy white M.C. Escher room, leading to his apartment. Wait, will someone explain the pillar jumping and the squishy ground and the gravity problem? Please?
  • Packaging for Wacom pen tablets. Simple backgrounds with the common artsy stuff. The Bamboo Pen & Touch Comic Edition◊ pretty much covers the entire front with cartoony stuff with only small bits of white background showing through.
  • Comcast commercials show inexplicable, joyously erupting rainbow scenery that turns into letters. It's Comcastic!
  • The psychedelic "Feed the Senses" Friskies cat food commercials, produced by Avrett Free Ginsberg. One full minute of a cat jumping through a dimensional portal into 3D Kitty Pepperland. (The one for Friskies Plus even featured a cat named Alice. There was a "making of" film showing the human actors who played the chickens and turkeys, and Friskies devoted part of its website to an interactive environment where you could create the psychedelic kitty land that would most appeal to your own cat. It was converted to 3D by the Nice Shoes production company and played before Alice in Wonderland (2010) (to enthusiastic applause) and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. (These days, it's all CGI-animated, but the cats are still tripping, if a bit more cynically.)
  • This ad celebrating 25 years of Photoshop, with the song "Dream On"!

Anime & Manga 

  • Bakemonogatari, hands down. In fact, anything done by Studio SHAFT will feature this trope in spades.
  • The Hetalia: Axis Powers credits fit in as many colours, random shapes, and movement as is watchable within 30 seconds.
  • The ending of the first season of K, the title of which translates to "Alone in a Cold Room", features one of the main characters sitting alone - presumably in a cold room - naked and sad, while flowers in this style pop up and swirl around her.
  • Occultic;Nine: The opening for the anime, with its flat colors, many textures, and use of a singular color accompanying black and white unshaded images.
  • Ouran High School Host Club's opening sequence features plenty of organically growing curlicues in the background.
  • The "dream" sequences of Black★Rock Shooter are basically this, complex designs and scenarios, with lots of color motifs and use of CGI. All employed to illustrate the conflicts of the main characters.
  • The opening and closing sequences of The Tatami Galaxy's anime adaptation. Additionally, the black and white background with selective coloring in the opening sequence prevails throughout the entire anime.
  • A short but cute anime video of Superflat First Love has strong elements of this.
  • Summer Wars has OZ, a social internet platform of sorts. It is a gigantic cat head with a headless bird on top and plenty of rainbow coloured book cases circling around it.◊ Needless to say that almost every scene in OZ is just one big Design Student wet dream, even when it becomes corrupted.
  • DEVILMAN crybaby features many such scenes, but one that stands out is the Sabbath rave in the first episode, with bright colors against a dark background and Off-Model animations that give the scene a psychedelic vibe.
  • Ghost in the Shell is well known for the incredible visuals and soundtrack in all its anime adaptations, but Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence cranks it up. At the arrival at Etorofu with the incredible plane scene, the film turns into half an hour of X-rated Scenery Porn.

Films — Animation 

Films — Live-Action 

  • James Bond films often have very strange opening credits. Most feature a design motif related to the preceding scene or with the plot of the movie, and many feature scantily clad (if not entirely nude, in silhouette) women dancing to the film's particular theme. They became even more elaborate when they Shifted to CGI.
  • Stranger Than Fiction visualizes Harold's number obsessed subconscious by having numbers, graphs, and equations pop up, fall down, or move along with him. You can see the opening here.
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture features a distractingly fancy and lengthy transporter effect, far more extreme than any of the other movies or the shows. The film also has lengthy lavish depictions of a space cloud.
  • The "past" poster of The Last Witch Hunter is rather baroque, incorporating dozens upon dozens of inerwoven, intricate details, each of them somehow referencing witchcraft as depicted in the film.
  • Precious has several posters where the artist was allowed to create a very abstract or impressionist style of an overweight woman's silhouette.

Literature 

  • Isaac Asimov:
    • The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories: The 1990 Gollancz cover has a white/grey pattern for the most part, with an enormous metal man lying down on the floor with sliding doors into their head where you can see a dusk-like sky, and skinny human figures made of solid colour are standing around with shadows. Pretty weird◊.
    • Tales of the Black Widowers has been published with multiple covers. One of the covers features a large spider, with seven human faces (one for each of the members) instead of eyes.
  • Das Zeitfahrrad: Curves and maybe circles are a recurring theme of the cover art, but why? Perhaps because "Das Zeitfahrrad" translates to "the time bike", but you could be forgiven for not realizing that the odd machine on the cover was supposed to be a sort of bicycle. It certainly doesn’t seem to have any wheels.

Live-Action TV 

Music 

  • Especially from the second half of the 1960s on, many album covers by rock bands and artists have become more artsy, especially by psychedelic and progressive rock bands. Art photographers, painters and designers were hired to provide beautifully crafted covers and gatefolds that had stunning visuals, lots of Scenery Porn, often the full lyrics, and sometimes even extra details and secret messages for the fans. This was a major reason many rock devotees mourned the decline of the vinyl record. You just can't do that kind of thing with a CD case.
  • Coldplay's cover for A Rush of Blood to the Head looks very simple, but the photo was taken using a 3-D scanning machine and overlayed with various enhancements by the artist.
  • Liz Phair's inside artwork for Exile in Guyville was influenced by Lopez Tejera's 1952 album The Joys and Sorrows of Andalusia. It even features polaroid shots of Liz and the management team, along with various other people.
  • The Beatles:
    • With the Beatles: The album cover by Robert Freeman shows the band members as four floating heads against a black background. It's simple, but so striking that countless bands have tried to imitate and parody it.
    • Revolver: a collage of various pictures mingled together with hand drawn portraits. The designer was Klaus Voormann, who would also create the collage posters on the cover of The Beatles Anthology.
    • Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed by Michael Cooper: a large collage of celebrity and more obscure photo cut-outs and wax statues together in an iconic background.
  • Tears for Fears:
  • Hipgnosis and Storm Thorgerson were among the most famous Album Cover Designers and are best known for their covers for Pink Floyd. They made the psychedelic universe cover of A Saucerful of Secrets, the Droste Image on Ummagumma, the rainbow prisma of The Dark Side of the Moon (which was drawn by graphic artist George Hardie), the businessmen shaking hands with a Man on Fire on Wish You Were Here (1975), the countless beds on the beach on A Momentary Lapse of Reason and the ambiguous faces on the cover of The Division Bell.
  • The Designers Republic is known for incorporating ironic anti- and pro-corporate aesthetics into its art style, along with minimalist logos, symbols, and hidden text, a style that became associated with the Y2K design aesthetic of the 1990s and early 2000s. The studio has done work for artists like Pulp, Supergrass, Pop Will Eat Itself, Aphex Twin, and Autechre on multiple occasions.
  • King Crimson's album covers for In the Court of the Crimson King, In the Wake of Poseidon, and Lizard all consist of elaborate, sleeve-spanning paintings, while Islands depicts a photo of the Trifid Nebula, with all the ethereal detail that comes with it. Particularly noteworthy is Lizard, whose cover was designed by Gini Barris. The name of the band is written in elaborate medieval lettering, and each letter incorporates depictions of scenes described in each song. The band has since stuck with simpler or outright minimalist album covers since.
  • David Bowie:
    • The album cover of Diamond Dogs was designed by famous Belgian pop art painter Guy Peellaert and shows Bowie and two other people as man-dog hybrids. Peellaert also did the cover of It's Only Rock 'n Roll by The Rolling Stones.
    • The album cover for Tonight features an elaborate painting done up to look like an abstract stained-glass window, typing in with the opening track ("Loving the Alien") and its critique of religious dogma.
  • Captain Beefheart painted several of his album covers himself, always in abstract, but very striking art: Shiny Beast and Doc at the Radar Station.
  • Anton Corbijn has designed the album covers of Captain Beefheart's Ice Cream for Crow, R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People, U2's The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.
  • Andy Warhol was another world famous album cover designer, responsible for the iconic yellow banana on the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico By Velvet Underground that could literally be peeled and the crotch shot on Sticky Fingers by The Rolling Stones with a real-life zipper.
  • The album cover of Appetite for Destruction by Guns N' Roses was first a painting by Robert Williams where a robot has just raped a girl. It was deemed too controversial and replaced by a shot of the band members as skeletons, painted by Billy White Jr.
  • Daniel Johnston designs the covers of all his albums, including Yip/Jump Music and Hi, How Are You.
  • Derek Riggs made a iconic painting of Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie the Head defeating the devil on the cover of The Number of the Beast.
  • Mark Ryden's design of Dangerous by Michael Jackson had a lot of surreal imagery and references to "The King of Pop" himself.
  • While Peter Saville is generally better-known for his Minimalistic Cover Art, on a number of occasions he has done work in the opposite extreme:
    • Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division is based on an image of radio waves from pulsar CP 1919, printed on hatch-textured pressboard stock.
    • My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne is an elaborate photo of abstract humanoid shapes swarming together. Saville created the picture by taping construction paper cutouts to a TV monitor that was hooked up to a camera, then pointing the monitor and the camera at one another to produce a feedback loop. Byrne praised the photo as a good visual analogy for the album's musique concrete style.
    • Republic by New Order is a collage of stock images themed around Saville's residence in California at the time, tying in with the album's mock-commercial approach by looking like a tourism brochure.
  • The album cover of The Man-Machine by Kraftwerk was designed by group member Ralf Hütter himself and shows the band members in a pose and typography that resembles a Soviet propaganda poster. The album covers of Autobahn (a POV shot from a car driving over the highway), Computer World (the band on a computer screen), and Techno Pop (CGI renders of the band members' heads) are also notable for their graphics.
  • Queen:
    • The album cover of News of the World is based on a painting by Frank Kelly Freas, an artist best known for painting scenes of science fiction stories. The image showed a giant intelligent robot holding a human corpse. The members of Queen asked Freas if he could paint the exact same image, only with them in place of the corpse.
    • The album art for Jazz, inspired by graffiti that Roger Taylor saw at the Berlin Wall, depicts a series of rings inside another series of rings, with a row of cyclists at the bottom of the image. The background rings are closer together at the outer edges of the design, which gives the appearance of a frosted bubble at a distance. The back cover features a mirrored, mostly color-inverted version of the artwork (with the album title retaining its magenta color). A zoetrope of cyclists also appears on the LP labels.
  • Frank Zappa's albums also often had detail grabbing covers or covers with a visually striking image:
  • The album cover of Abraxas by Santana, which is a 1961 painting by Mati Klarwein.
  • Kurt Cobain designed the album cover of Incesticide and the back cover of In Utero himself.
  • Bob Dylan also painted the portraits on the album covers of Self Portrait and Planet Waves themselves.
  • The album cover of Licensed to Ill by Beastie Boys was designed by World B. Omes (pseudonym of David Gambale) and features a Boeing 727, with the band name on the tail, crashing head-on into a mountain side.
  • Pocket Revolution (2005) by Belgian band dEUS features a Cool Star Ship on the cover, designed by Don Lawrence, author of the comic strip Storm.
  • One of the reasons why f(x) is still well-regarded in the K-Pop industry long after their hiatus is the album packaging for their albums Pink Tape and 4 WALLS courtesy of graphic designer Min Hee-jin:
  • The iconic shot of Patti Smith striking a Frank Sinatra-like pose, with her Coat Over the Shoulder on Horses, was shot by her friend, famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In fact, all her album cover photos were by him, until his death from AIDS. The last photos he took for one of her records were for Dream of Life in early 1987. He died two years later.
  • The album cover of Songs About Fucking by Big Black is done In the Style of Manga art, featuring a woman gritting her teeth while in lordosis.
  • The cover of The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest shows a stylized black woman painted green and red.
  • The black-and-white stylized portrait of Lou Reed on the cover of Transformer, designed by Mick Rock and Klaus Voormann.
  • The colorful cover of 4US (Album) by Doe Maar features four shots of a female model.
  • The album cover of Pictures at an Exhibition by Emerson, Lake & Palmer is literally a group of paintings in a museum.
  • Led Zeppelin's first four albums are also very striking designs. Led Zeppelin I features a shot of the Hindenburg disaster, Led Zeppelin II is a collage of the band, based on a picture of World War I, Led Zeppelin III is another collage cover and Led Zeppelin IV features a 19th century rustic painthing of an old man. Houses of the Holy was designed by Hipgnosis.
  • The Grateful Dead were known for their psychedelic album covers, full with colorful and trippy abstract images, such as Anthem of the Sun and American Beauty.
  • Several of Jean-Michel Jarre's album covers are surrealist paintings by Michel Granger. Oxygène depicts the Earth as a skull, for which Jarre received official permission to use it. The album's follow-up, Équinoxe, likewise sports a specially commissioned painting by Granger depicting a massive audience staring at the viewer through binoculars. Meanwhile, Rendez-Vous features a painting of an anthropomorphic Earth cupping her hands to her mouth.
  • The album cover of Dookie is a very detailed drawing full with little humoristic scenes going on.
  • Another way of using a design students' orgasm on your album cover is by literally using an actual iconic painting or statue. Since many of the artists have been dead for centuries you have the advantage of not having to pay any copyright.
  • Most of Roger Dean's album covers for Yes were depictions of lush psychedelic landscapes. Tales From Topographic Oceans,◊ Fragile◊, and particularly Relayer◊ are probably most representative of this style. Also his album covers for Asia. (The covers for Aqua, Arena, and Archiva were done by Rodney Matthews.)
    • The beautifully done flying elephants which became a group logo for Osibisa - a Take That! at slightly racist record company execs who snootily considered African music could never, ever, take off in the major markets of the West and any investment in a band based on African rhythm was a complete waste of money.
  • Mika is a huge fan of bright, colourful, sixties-inspired visuals, which can be seen on most of the art for his albums and singles, as well as certain Animated Music Videos like "Lollipop" and "Relax (Take It Easy)".
  • The cover of Maroon 5's album Overexposed fits this trope to a tee.◊
  • Everything Studio Killers does. The music video for "Eros and Apollo" in particular, ranging from 2D art to 3D CGI and adding pixel art to the mix.
  • A number of covers for charity albums by the Red Hot Organization fit this trope, but the most egregious has to be the rather creepy cover art for◊ Silencio = Muerte: Red Hot + Latin.
  • little xs for eyes's music video for their single "Love Gets Lost" had the director recording several performances of the song by the band on a green screen and mixing the footage with a large variety of shapes and colors.
  • Belarusian band Lyapis Trubetskoy music video Capital is a fine example.
  • Basically anything OK Go has done post-Oh No, but special mention goes to the videos for "The Writing's On the Wall," "Obsession", and "I Won't Let You Down."
  • Grimes could be the queen of this trope. Nearly all of her album covers are her own artwork, which happen to be very ornate and lush with the detail—Visions, Art Angels, and Miss Anthropocene especially. She's made a point of how important visuals are to her, so it's no surprise her albums fall under this trope.
  • Any graphic design student could go on an endless rant about the perfection of Weyes Blood's cover of Titanic Rising, showing her floating underwater in a submerged bedroom. The cover was shot practically by constructing a bedroom set and filling it up with water, and the result is spectacular.
  • Joanna Newsom's album covers always have a lot of thought put into them, but Ys (2006) is probably the most emblematic of this trope, being a full-on oil painting of Newsom by artist Benjamin Vierling. The Milk-Eyed Mender shows a complex embroidery piece.
  • Lauren Bousfield has done this several times:
    • Colonists shows several differently coloured fabrics layered over each other in an uneven collage. One of those fabrics includes a Mickey Mouse glove.
    • Every artwork in From Rotting Fantasylands: each artwork resembles an abstract photo collage, depicting a variety of Eldritch imagery.
    • Palimpsest depicts a glitchy image loosely resembling a bundle of pages.

Video Games 

Other 

  • The fine artist Julie Mehretu bleeds this trope with her maximallist take on abstract art.◊
  • An egregious offender is a particular trend in men's designer t-shirts, to cram as much random stuff on a square yard of fabric as possible. On one particularly offending sample: a skull with a rose between its teeth, five ravens, a statue of Justice, the innards of a cassette tape, a Shinto shrine, some more roses, a wreath of thorns, and what looks like a map of the coast of Norway. This is all on the same shirt.
  • There is a Guitar Hero shirt with a similar baroque-inspired take on this style, involving many vaguely organic shapes centered around a Gibson SG controller, with cherubs facing opposite directions holding Kramer Striker controllers.
  • Design students' orgasms aren't only limited to Western art, either; there are Islamic styles very prone to them such as 15th- and 16th-century Persian architecture. Almost every available surface was decorated with painted tile. Then there's Ottoman Turkish buildings, which don't look like this until you go inside them.
  • Pencil Vs Camera by Ben Heine. A photo background framing a drawing of random stuffnote  'exploding' out of the camera.
  • All the works by the aforementioned The Designers Republic/tDR from Sheffield are these. Their◊ early◊ works◊ incorporates Russian Constructivism themes with Colorful inputs, rebellious themes, and awesome typography which boosted their popularity, while Their◊ 90's◊ works◊ are mostly Animesque (though they are one of the early adopters of such style), but has flavors (catchy color palettes) and details (cute icons, shapes, and intentional Gratuitous Japanese) that popularized such style. Later◊ works◊ features minimalism and unique fonts that was regarded as the defining visual aesthetics of Electronic Music. Their works are highly regarded, to the point the studio became the most copied design studio ever existed. They are one of the only Graphic design studios who has a large following/dedicated fandom. They are currently dead,note  but their legacy and impact in the graphic design industry is huge.
  • The 2014 Football World Cup official poster◊ provides a perfect example: vectorized graphics with a net outline made of a myriad of bright blue, orange, yellow, orange and green little Brazilian motives, all on a white background, which has Brazil's map shape. A textbook (and beautiful) example.