What effect has technology had on the design process
within Graphic design over the last 25 years?
Introduction
This essay will discuss how the process of design has changed over the
last 25 years and give a clearer view of the design industry in the UK and how
it has changed because of the welcoming of technology.
Technology has shaped the way designers function today it can be
referred to as “electronic cocaine” from a proposal on the ITV news, which said
that around 70% of people would become stressed when they cannot access the
internet, technology has become a huge part of people lives and most say they
cannot be without it. 62% of people believe technology has changed their lives.
One of the first things creatives do, when entering a place of work is
to which on a computer. The working nature now expects a fast response to
clients ‘wants through technology, such as twitter, email and other social
network.
“It is clear that designer’s
‘a field of operation’ has changed considerably in recent years. A major
influence on this has been, and continues to be, technology.”
(Noble and Beastley, 2004)
The above is from a practicing designer who has experience for some
twenty years or more, the author feels well placed to investigate furthermore
and comment, on a personal level, the changes and the effect that modern
technology has placed on the graphic design industry. When the author started
out as a junior graphic designer in 1987/88, in a small design and advertising
firm in Blackburn, work was carried out on drawing boards using equipment such
as letterset, gum, rubilith, burnishers and darkrooms, creating his own type,
which back then was sent out to a typesetting business to be delivered back to
the firm hours later in gallery form.
The time period of this was a time when it would take a day or two to
produce an A5 leaflet for a client and if they decided it wasn’t quite right,
it would literally be back to the drawing board. It was 6 – 8 months after the
author joined a company that they purchased their first Apple Mac. Which over
time, revolutionized the design process in the design industry forever.
Emerging technologies changes are believed to be the most important.
Transforming technologies have over and over again transformed this fairly
youthful industry and there us a high likely chance that these will continue to
impact. Consideration must be given to how much technology also affects socio –
cultural changes, education, employment, and economic changes which appear to
make it an important driver of the industry. Additionally, even when there is a
rejection of emerging technologies, it has an influence on graphic design so it
remains a pivotal factor.
“The ability to recall
events, experiences, information, and skills… The ability to store and access
information that has been acquired through experienced. Memory is a critical
component of practically all aspects of human thinking, including perception,
learning, language and problem solving.”
(Oxford dictionary/Encyclopaedia)
Networking/Application Theory
“Design
Is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of
craft, science, storytelling, propaganda and philosophy.”
(Erik Adigard 2012)
The design industry is a key part of the economy, with UK business
investing up to 35billion (UK pounds) a year on design (Haskal and pesole,
2011). As the economic structure changes many business class Graphic Design as
a luxury and as such only utilize it when its necessary. Other companies look
at the design industry as something that adds value to their business and
invest heavily into possibilities of economic growth and promotion of
expansion.
Graphic design is also used as a response to fashion and trend cycles.
Examples of this are seen every day on TV through advertising, billboards and
promotional material that plasters our lives on a daily basis. It is also
relevant within new subcultures and also through the media and social media
which alters behaviour.
The key to these factors is with education and employment. University
graduates find themselves qualified to do the job but no vacancies to take up.
This in turn sets off an inherent chain of events in that students do one of
the three things, go and find something else to do short term. Go back to
university and begin a higher level of education, or set up their own freelance
design business.
Any one of these three outcomes has a knock on effect within industry
today. If we (as students) do something else on a temporary basis they are
likely to never return to the industry. Returning to university or higher
education will impact on university opportunity’s and therefore become oversubscribed.
Freelancing leads to a very limiting industry with quaint ‘one man brands’
fighting for the same type of business and undercutting because of the low
overheads making design a cheap asset.
The definition of the designer is becoming blurred. The availability of
technology these days means that anyone with a computer and the correct
software can become a designer. This has both negative and positive effects: A
negative effect is that work with no concept or meaning is not just being let
loose into the public domain, this means creatives who make effort with their
work do get appreciated and therefore design gets seen as something ‘easy to
create’ and is not taken seriously as a subject. Although because of this new
technology, work can be produced quicker and in vast amounts for
businesses/companies that are wanting quantity’s created in a short amount of
time.
“Business
champions must experience the transformational impact of good design in their
business before they themselves can start to become champions of design in
their regions and their industries,”
(Sir George Cox, “Cox
Review,” 2005)
Impact on Professional
practice
Technology has to great extent, remove boundaries within Graphic design.
Whereas Graphic design was much more of a ‘craft’ before. It has merged with
the realms of digital art. This is the doom and the glory of graphic design
today. On hand, modern graphic design is beautiful, varied, and endless, which
is made possible by machines and a much shorter distance from idea to product.
On the other hand, it is a thorn in the side of the people starting up who are
passionate about Graphic design as a profession.
The fast pace and easiness of grasping the technology, and current trend
of computers and technology has created a boom in graphic design, there are now
more graphic designers graduating every year than there are positions within
graphic design industry. More so this is that fact that the common perception
is that its software programs are easy to learn, then graphic design is easy.
This leads to pressurization on pricing.
There was a time when to be a graphic designer, you needed to have the
ability to draw to gain a position within the industry. This craft based sector
was truly an art based. With the welcoming of the computer skill this was not
needed anymore and almost overnight we lost this design form.
The Arrival of the internet
The start of Apple Mac in 1984 was welcomed as the first consumer of GUI
(Graphical User Interface) which, caused a design revolution. The advancement
of the GUI has ultimately created a field for designers to learn. In Hindsight,
during the nineties designers played with the web and digital products and then
left them due to pixilation. The web opened new opportunities for graphic
designers but they were slow to find their influence on to it. This meant that
individuals from other disciplines and backgrounds had plenty of opportunity to
grasp and because of this it influenced it.
From the late nineties the status of graphic design as a real subject
has been undergoing evaluation. This could be explained as a negative gap of
the subject, but it strengthens graphic designer’s roots. Modernists of this
subject such as Rodchenki Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy have naturally moved openly
across boundaries in the twenties and thirties.
As graphic design history has acknowledged, the subject that Dwihhins
name in 1922 no boundaries when it came to working with other areas of media
(Poynor, Rick – 2004). The truth of the commercial print world being manipulated
by many ‘mainstream graphic designers’ with its reliability on form over
typography and layout, but design is a process and not an end point. Graphic
design used to be an open varied, broad and inventive subject, constantly
challenging and changing its own established ‘rules’.
Design professional Practice
Issues
Some of the key issues that technology and its impact have on graphic
design industry are that the equipment we now use on a daily basis is very
disposable and also because of its nature it is forever changing and at speed
to. You can buy a new laptop one week and the next it becomes obsolete. In
terms of demand for technology was as an industry have hunger for it trying to
use the latest must have idea, a good example of this would be the new
technology being created with “augmented reality” it is recent increase to
design and is already creating credit for its advertisers through good design.
So how does Graphic design fit into today’s society? Good graphic design
can get a complicated message across efficiently and mentally connect with the
audience which stimulates a basic human need, an emotion. Every day we are
surrounded with graphics and images that tell us what to do, get a message
across, allow us to learn, influence is decision making, and create a feeling
or connection. The list just gets longer, the more you think about it.
It is important for graphic designers to communicate with a wide range
of audience which link to the target audience. It is because of this that it is
important for graphic designers to have a good understanding of marketing,
modern trends and society as a whole.
In society the biggest delusion is that design is a richness/luxury, as
we have already reviewed above, design is a central of life.
It is interesting to know that design is integral to 39% of rapidly
growing companies but to only 7% of static ones. Also business that increases
its investment in design is more than twice as likely to see its turnover grow
as a business that does not. An interesting statistic is that 34% of companies
that see design as essential or significant say added value has a great impact
on their business.
The design industry, like all other publishing industry, is facing huge
loop holes and undergoing great changes because of media. Some fear those
changes: others appreciate them and thrive on the new world that awaits them.
Reflection and further
Discussion
There are many essays and online debates regarding the subject of
technology and its impact within Graphic design – non more influential than:
The design Talkboard: (http://www.designtalkboard.com/links.php), this website
talks about debates with well-known designers that are in the industry.
The undertaking of this experiment has outlined the behind the desk
researching (Fig.2) the subject of graphic design is not really reliable and
has proven difficult to gain a true understanding of the industry. There have
been many assumptions made throughout this essay that cannot truly be sustained
and as such the author feels that there needs to be more debate in this subject
to reach a better understanding of the issues faced.
Having lived and worked through probably the most significant change
within the graphic design industry, the author feels ideally placed to reflect
back and comment on the legacy that has been left behind with regard to
technology. The welcoming of the Apple Mac (Fig,3) in 1984 changed the graphic
design industry as we have reviewed previously in this essay. Along with those
issues with technology there are also issues of education and preparing the
next generation of designers.
Fig.3 – Apple Mac 128k
Fig.2 – The old tradition of using drawing board
The author has had some time to look at how education is creating out
next generation of designers. Developing his own business, the, author has
taken on work placements for colleges and universities. There has been occasions where students
wouldn’t be able to sketch design on a rough bit of paper mostly due to
confidence, also the opposite of this is that they couldn’t produce anything on
a Mac, due to not having access to one of not being taught correctly how to use
one.
It is important to consider design work created before the welcoming of
the Mac so that the audience and future generations can understand the skills
that where needed to be a graphic designer 20 years ago. The author pointed out
a graphic designer called Pamela May Alchorn. Her work is significant legacy in
a time of pantone, magic markers and CS10 board.
Fig.4
Fig.5
These two poster pieces that she has produced, Besenol (Fig.4) and
Temgestic (Fig.5) . Notice how the lines she has used are a squiggle on this
poster, this copy of design is not so popular today these and would not be
accepted for a visual today. Clients have come to want to see a professional
mock-up that they can show their pears right away, which therefore pushed
practical design further away.
You can’t beat the physical contact of handling work like this in your
hands and seeing it up close while you get it print ready and colour match with
various darkroom colour correction techniques. Now you just press a button on
the Keyboard or adjust tab. It might be easier now but it really requires no
skill in the big picture. Lots of really good and skilled people lost their
jobs back then because of the changes the Mac brought business.
The Experiment
To try and understand the relevance of technology within today’s society
of the graphic designer the author embarked upon an experiment. It was decided
that a small sample group of students on a BA course in Graphic Design would be
the ideal subjects.
Four students were told to undertake the experiment (Fig.6). Two of them
completed the experiment using technology alone and the other two would use
only materials that were available to them so no scanners or computers.
(Fif.6) –The experiment sheets
the final results from the experiment were by no means conclusive but
did give an insight into limitations and final outcomes. It was decided to keep
the subject number to a small scale, as large numbers would have been too difficult
to control.
Fig7 – Non DTP Fig8 –
Non DTP Fig9 – DTP Fig10 – DTP
Having a look through the results of the experiment there were some
parts which were interesting. Firstly, if we look at the visuals that were
created we plainly see the DTP results were completed to a far higher standard
and could have been presented to a client for suggestions. As for the
non-technology set outcomes one of the design sheets has some really
interesting ideas that could be working up to a finished visual whereas the
other was still in its infancy although there was a design process in action.
The conclusion to this is that both technology’s and created design have
their place in the world of graphic design but it you need something producing
quickly there is now only really one solution ad that is to use a Mac.
Current debates on graphic
design & technologies impact
A debate that is my interest is how graphic design is seen in today’s
society? People have started to disrespect graphic design as a subject, they
say its trendy and reliant on the computer and the computer only, or we are
artists that are ‘sold out’! This statement is somewhat true, but design is
more than negative comments. Good design isn’t reliant on anything. It can be
made on a computer. It can be made on cut out paper. It’s not reliant on
current trends or styles.
“I
believe that one chooses to become a graphic designer because one loves type,
image and form, and the act of using them to craft messages and propagate ideas
“.
(Steven Heller)
“A
designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away,”
(Anthony
De Saint – Exupery “BrianyQuote,” 2013)
Design graduates will be the entrepreneurs and visionaries of the future
and it is imperative that they understand they can make the changes that are necessary
of the actions of a few famous individuals.
Conclusion
Like it or not, the graphic design industry has changed and is changing
rapidly and in my opinion its impossible to go back over the 25 years. With the arrival of the Apple Mac and more
significant the internet the industry has changed dramatically at a rate and
welcomed this new technology with open arms. With the speed that technology
grasped hold of the industry from my personal opinion I feel that we have lost
some of the design that we embraced so proudly up until the late 80’s. Because
of this it’s important that further education needs to educate their students
for the next generation of designers to go back to basics.
Highlighted earlier in this essay the experiment wet some way to
pointing out negatives and positives of both crafted design and DTP design. My
personal view of this change with the industry is that computers which have
been welcomes into the design world have now made design soulless and
meaningless because we work at such a fast pace today it will be very difficult
to take this skill back and bring it back into mainstream design once again.
The only way this art can be truly reorganized now is through education and
future designers.
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