Praiseworthy Web Design But Controversial Use of Midjourney
Paula Scher’s team at Pentagram has designed a new website in collaboration with the Federal Government called performance.gov. Federal law requires the White House and major agencies — such as Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Defense, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) — to set strategic goals to benefit the public. Progress towards these goals is documented and made available in reports on the performance.gov website. Progress towards these goals is documented and made available in reports on the new website which is run out of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and General Services Administration (GSA).
The goal of the Pentagram project team — Paula Scher, Kirstin Rocke-Huber, Bruno Bergallo, Olivia Ray, Yansong Yang and Frank LaRocca — was to make the often detailed and complicated reporting more accessible to the general public by making the editorial content attractive and readable. Among the solutions: they compiled a library of stock photos, and enhanced them with color overlays to be used for agency profiles and top priorities.
Pentagram also used the AI tool Midjourney to create the illustration style. They started with handmade inputs — paint and cut paper — and fed examples into Midjourney to train it on the aesthetic. After several rounds of prompts, the components became 1,500 ready-to-go icons for any agency to use going forward. And, thus, a controversary was born: the use of Midjourney has been divisive. Some in the creative community see the work as the cutting edge use a new technology by a smart and innovative design firm leader. Others are upset and disappointed at the firm’s embrace of automation over the hiring of real people and are critical, to the edge of vitriol, about the work’s shortcomings.
Never shy, Paula Scher is pushing back. In an interview with Fast Company and elsewhere, Scher argues that this use of AI is a best practice for a modern design firm. She argues that 1,000+ government-approved icons, necessary to make the scheme work, would have been impossible given Pentagram’s three-month, five designer window on the project (plus another three months unpaid). “My argument about this, and where the differential is, is that the definition of design in the dictionary is ‘a plan’,” says Scher. “We created a plan, and it was based around the fact that this would be self-sustaining, and therefore was not a job for an illustrator… We will use the best tools available to us to accomplish the ideas we have.”
