I don’t understand why people these days feel the need to redo everything. If something has been up and running for thirty years, why would you feel the need to change it all? I feel that there’s something extremely pretentious in that attitude, I feeling of ‘well I can do a better job than they did’. There is a reason why it’s been there for so long; it’s practical, it works, it looks good, it gets the job done. I don’t see why people feel the need to just swoop in and, as the saying goes, fix something that wasn’t broken.
Take corporate signs in Melbourne as an example. Having a sign up that’s well designed so it looks good and practical in the sense that it shows people the name of the company is not a difficult feat. Certainly, signs that are thirty years old, unless they’re falling off their hinges, still meet those criteria. Despite that, there is a building in my neighbourhood that’s sign changes at least every six months and I simply don’t understand it. Every time I see it on my morning walk, it seems to have workmen on it, changing it again.
I realise that it may be just because I’m getting older, but part of me thinks that only the only reason they change the signs at all is to give all the signwriters in Melbourne something to do. There cannot possibly be that many new businesses that need a sign created for them from scratch. But this constant urge to undergo continual modernisation seems like such a waste of resources and talent. Surely there’s something better for our young people to be doing with their time. Surely businesses have better ways to use their money. To me, the only thing this process succeeds in creating is an unnecessary amount of waste.