The ugly cake of design

Daisy Alioto on the right kind of ugly.

In 2017, my best friend and I used to go to parties at a design co-working space in Williamsburg called The Bakery after its former tenants. I had just been laid off from the short-lived US edition of Wallpaper* magazine and so was trying my hand at freelancing, which included meeting and talking to a lot of young designers. 

An old flyer for an exhibition at The Bakery lists well-known makers like Fort Standard and Wintercheck Factory (now Wentrcek Zebulon) as participants. Wintercheck also hosted exhibitions at their studio in Bedstuy. I remember one group show that featured Asa Pingree and DUSEN DUSEN among others. (The last time I interviewed Wentrcek Zebulon, we talked in darkness because ConEd had turned off the power to their old studio.)

When we first met, Wintercheck were making lights, tables and seating with huge, crumbling chunks of rubber that reminded me specifically of Indian sweets made with chickpea flour. Later forays into vinyl-coated foam were also delightfully off-putting, if less edible-seeming. 

I thought about those old days at “The Bakery” again recently amid a discourse about “ugly cakes” kicked off by a hot take in The Cut with a response from Cake Zine. “I’m not saying these cakes don’t require skill, artistry, and impressive amounts of labor to create. But beneath all the branches and glitter, they’re often just not that good,” wrote Bindu Bansinath in The Cut. 

Bansinath calls out some aesthetic signatures of these cakes: overly frosted, tiered or heart shaped, accessorized with bows, cherries, glitter and/or piping. They can also take the form of shapeless “floral slop” like frosted hillsides dotted with single-stemmed flowers. We’ve all seen these cakes on Instagram and at events that are optimized to end up there. 

But what’s the problem, really? Cake Zine’s response focused on the individual bakers that make their livelihoods on these bespoke cakes. “Many of the bakers targeted in this story create dessert for events that are breathlessly covered in the very same publication.” 

When it comes to ugliness in design, there is the lazily ugly and the artfully ugly. My take: even imperfection can feel like tyranny when it’s repeated too many times. But the real tyranny is the way the TikTok and Instagram algorithms elevate trends, so you can’t see an “ugly cake” just once without having your face shoved in it.

Lazily ugly can still have some human labor behind it. I’m thinking of those DIY foam mirrors that became popular a few years ago. Not without effort, but perhaps lacking deep intention—if you want to see artless passion, tab over to the @uglydesign account.

I think what Cake Zine is getting at, ultimately, is that “ugly” cannot be mass-produced, except by the algorithm where it shows up repeatedly to the point of annoyance—hence Bansinath’s hot take in The Cut. It’s a nice reminder to cherish the design equivalent of the bespoke ugly cake, wherever you find it. 

For me, it’s Wentrcek Zebulon, which has flourished in the years since we last spoke and is now represented by Marta in Los Angeles. I am pleased to report their work is still fucking ugly. Or the oeuvre of Korean artist Eun-Ha Paek, especially her 3D printed ceramics. One 2024 work called Duck Lips is a drippy bird head with bulging eyeballs and a shock of red hair. 

If you’re old enough to remember when Jamie Lauren Keiles stepped in shit test riding the Balenciaga Triple S for SSENSE, you’ll be pleased to know that Alex Proba’s June 2025 collaboration with Hoka is equally ugly. 

As Viktoriia Vasileva wrote in August 2024, “[Weird] makes the mundane interesting, the manufactured forgivable, and the out-of-touch grounded.” Instagram will eventually move on from the “ugly cake” trend but real bakers won’t stop making them.