I’ve been a fan of Spanish design studio Serial Cut for a long time now and I was dead excited last night when I surfed onto their new website. On first impression the site is a slick minimal creation finished in the trademark ‘Retro Chic’ aesthetic Serial Cut have become famous for; on closer inspection the site is a technical masterpiece of JQuery and CSS coding (for the unitiated this is real web design, not an Adobe Flash cop out).

Unfortunately, for me anyway, that’s where the fun ended. Looking through the selected projects there is a stronger emphasis on pure image making than before. I admit that I’m not necessarily the right kind of person to judge such work but I do get the feeling the ‘cardboard cutout mixed with retro bits and bobs’ approach is well past it sell by date by now.

The graphic design work on show is similarly stale. I was immediately stuck by the tacky branding job for Charada nightclub. This shiny ‘Web 2.0-ish’ identity looks to me like a lame rehash of earlier Serial Cut work. Their work for Springfield though is better. This well finished ‘look book’ would probably take pride of place in most designer portfolios, but remember, this was once a studio that was on the cutting edge of design trend, bright colours and clean type screen printed on uncoated card has been done countless times before, it always looks great but is ultimately now pretty safe design. The work in the images above I feel is the best of the new work. The ‘Akzidenz like’ style of typography is closer to the pulse of current typographic trend, yet still this is not really enough to inspire and excite.

Overall I’m disappointed with the latest body of work from Serial Cut. You may decide for yourself.