Tools

Last decade's buzzwords granular and fine-grained emphasised grittiness, detail and technical complexity. This decade's successor has a rather different flavour. Borrowed from fashion and design, where it meant mixing rough and raw finishes with fine and smooth, the term textured has now been adopted to denote more general lifestyle choices, consumption patterns and even business philosophies.

For trendy consumers it describes more subtle forms of self-indulgence, meshing the worthy with the frivolous, as in trekking for charity one day, self-pampering at a spa the next — but avoiding at all costs the beige and the middle-of-the-road. In business-speak textured, like the equally fashionable tonality, describes a nuanced, eclectic approach, typically blending the green and ethical with the commercial. For marketers and web-designers texturisation means appealing to aesthetics and taste by building subtlety and variation into the marketing mix, the pitch and/or the product itself.

• Tweet