I happened on a thing new to me - memetic analysis (“…which is a method for deriving insights from the data you have collected.”)

More usefully, it’s a memes (apologies. Means) by which you identify similarities in things in order to work out what pairs of what strongly suggest a way to direct your tastes. 

Or tastes of your clients, as we used to with a (rather more physical version of the recommend new-world way of doing this, via ChatEtc. natch) we called ‘mood boards’.

Assembling the right pairs of pre-existing things - just enough to convince the client the design direction was ‘right’ (i.e. popular enough not to create a design faux-pas) but not to ‘obvious’ as to appear you’re simply copying.

Moodboards (or mood-boards, or Mood Boards) were a real pain to assemble, as images had to be scoured from actual books (hence design office libraries to put The Great Library of Alexandria into shade.)

They were also, as a result of the physical act of creating them, actually more like a part of the design process. 

Rather than re-pining everyone else’s pre-picked taste selections to P*nterest page, finding, scaling, arranging, juxtaposing and even building up in three-d  - hoping that someone would notice your homage to Ben Nicolson’s composition ‘1934 (relief)’.

As someone who used to also use these exercises to pretend playing at John Heartfield or Peter Kennard, they were deeply satisfying. It was annoying to note some in the industry decrying them recently (Mar 29, 2024 to be precise) as near to useless. 

Until I realised (I think) that the blast against them was exactly right.

Spotting patterns is easy if some algorithm’s already set them up to see.

It’s what you reveal when you’re doing the looking, elsewhere from the Internet Of Selections, that you spot the idea. 

And being able to tell the difference whether the ‘eme’ is one-hit m-shaped or more interestingly theme-shaped (even if a bit less funny.)

Featuring a feature image of an actual mood board from 2012