Thursday, September 27, 2012

It's hard to be a team player if there's no team!

As you might guess from the name of this blog, I've been at this design-thing for a long time. I've seen the industry go through a lot of changes. When I got my first gig as a staff artist at an ad agency, I worked with a whole team of other professionals, including customer reps, photographers, copywriters, typesetters, lithographers, color photo scanner/separators... all specialists in their fields. My job as a designer was to develop the idea and design, acquire the right team for the job and coordinate their work to get a final piece produced. If we'd been making a movie, I would have been the producer/director, working with a writer, staging and lighting staff, actors and the rest, then supervising the editor, and delivering the final work for distribution. Quite enough to keep one person busy.

The early 90s saw new computer tools being developed for design and production. By the mid 90s, I was concerned about being able to keep working; I knew the industry was headed toward being completely handled by computer and that all my hard-won skills with Rapidograph pens and T-squares and triangles were about to be rendered moot. I hunted for ways to learn the new skills I would need. Fortunately the place I was working at the time decided to make the jump from traditional production to digital production without ditching its current art staff, and we were all pretty much in the same boat: we all needed to learn EVERYTHING. Most of us had some geek-tendencies and started picking the skills up quickly. There was one guy who just wasn't getting it though -- he was great with the Xacto blade but not with the mouse. He didn't last very long, and I missed him. First member of my team gone.

As expected, more and more tasks were completed by the designers with our Macs. We set our own type -- goodbye to the professional typesetters. Good news: lots of flexibility, and no more waiting a day to get a strip of type back. Bad news: rather than using that saved time to shorten our workload, we started doing half a dozen variations to see what they looked like, and our clientele learned (and then demanded) that they could get those half a dozen alterations within hours instead of weeks. We got scanners, and started doing scans of logos and black and white photos, moving eventually to doing our own color scanning, which meant goodbye to the professional color separator. Good news: lots more flexibility with resizing, where before once we'd ordered the separations we were locked into that size. Bad news: we lost the years of expertise and access to super-high quality color scanning, and had to take on responsibility for color correction ourselves. We started embedding the scans into our text document so that the entire job could be completed on one work station, ready to send to the printer, which meant goodbye to the lithographer. Same sort of good news/bad news... production time compressed (not shortened, just packed more full of stuff), years of expertise lost. Then came the stock photos, and goodbye to the photographers. The copywriters had been blown off long ago; why pay another person? Anybody can write. (Gawd.)

By the turn of the century, a designer had become a composite of all of those lost professionals (while not acquiring the combined paychecks of the whole team, mind you!). The tools all became more powerful, and soon anybody with a computer and enough dough to buy the software could be a designer. There were fine-tuning tools in the software for beautiful kerning, delicate color adjustments, accurate trapping, and conversion from rgb to cmyk profiles. Not that the "just buy the software and start passing out business cards" designers (coff, coff) had a clue what any of that meant. Printers' nightmares increased with more and more frequent submission of completely unusable digital files (I noticed that early on, InDesign changed the color name in the Swatches palette from "white" to "paper." Gee, I wonder why...). And the designers were more and more required to be a one-person art and production department, isolated and dumped upon.

(Yes, I'm whining. I've been at this long enough to have earned the right, thank you.)

Another shift has happened, every bit as rattling as the transition from traditional to digital production, and it's not just in the design industry. Publishing, retail sales, document delivery, and so much more have been turned inside out by the transition from traditional media to online media. Newspapers can only carry yesterday's news. Retail shops can only carry limited stock, and can only drop their sale price so far. Document couriers? Who needs 'em? Good news: fast, fast, fast, fast. Lots and lots of options, and immediate comparisons. Bad news? Somebody's got to be able to create the applications that will get the message online -- fast and accurate, and a new challenge: hacker-proof -- and that's not going to be your friendly neighborhood designer.

Now personally, I really like programmers. I like their geeky creativity, their offbeat humor, their ability to make magic happen behind the scenes... and the fact that they can do so much that I can't. I like working alongside a programmer -- I like designing and organizing a layout, knowing that the programmer can write the code that will make those blank cells fill up with good stuff from a database, or create a usable document of answers to the questions in the form I've designed... "here's what I want to happen; what do you need from me?" That's what I used to do with the lithographer back in the 80s. We'd figure it out as a team. It was fun, it was challenging, and I got darned good at my job because I learned so much from those experienced professionals.

Sounds great, right?

Actually...

It's all supposed to be one person again. So goodbye designer, hello programmer. It's your turn to learn everything that I know because you need to "handle the web site." Job descriptions that come up with a search for "graphic designer" require a list of skills including php, javascript, jQuery... apparently there's really no more call for just a designer.  Where the transition was a matter of learning to use tools to manipulate a layout, now it's wandering off into a completely different and weaker part of the designer's brains. Same problem if it's the programmer being asked to also be the designer. The idea that this whole desperately complex job can be handled by a single individual is ludicrous.

Yes, I'm stating my opinion as if it were fact. It's my blog, deal with it.

I'm currently taking classes to upgrade my skill set, and have tried my hand at developing sites from the ground up, but they are, to date, pretty basic in their functionality. I can design it, but I still need help with the programming. I am absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I still have to learn, if I'm going to remain viable as a professional designer. I would so much rather play to my strengths.

There are PSD-to-HTML services out there (the designer supplies a Photoshop layout, they chew it up into code), but I haven't tried them out yet. Maybe that's the solution. But I so so, so, so miss having a team to work with, someone I can sit across a table from, making notes on a sketch pad. Guess that's all handled online now too. It's as if we've all been asked to sit quietly in our own little isolation tanks and not interact with anyone anymore. Hey, just get out your smartphone and text. Keep your head down and walk right into a tree. (Or trip into a fountain at the mall.)

I miss my team.