From the 2010s, the Japanese graphic designer Yui Takada (AllRightGraphics) began winning a pile of JAGDA awards — yet his work looks like a flyer knocked out by a roadside print shop: clashing typefaces, conflicting colours, crooked composition, misregistered printing, some type even looking like a Word default.

The industry was baffled — this was clearly 'badly made' design, so why was it winning? Takada's own answer: 'Because all design today is made too well.' When every poster is polished, aligned, full of white space and set in Helvetica, deliberately doing it 'wrong' is what gets noticed. Japan's design world named the trend 'New Ugly' (ニューアグリー).

Its ancestor is 1990s America's David Carson (editor of Ray Gun magazine) — he deliberately set interview layouts until they were unreadable, and the whole magazine became the most influential visual publication of the 90s. New Ugly is Carson's East-Asian, low-key, street-level version, 30 years on.

It has a subtle condition: you must first be extremely skilled to fake having no skill. The 'ugly' a beginner makes is just ugly; the 'ugly' a master like Takada makes is every rule broken exactly once — and that is the true meaning of New Ugly.