Technology Fuels Design
Words by James Gordon Bennett Jr.
Truly, we live in a wonderful era. That is, a wonderful era to be a designer. It seems as if most professions get their own “Golden Age”. I am talking about a period of time where some fantastic innovation occurs and everything about the profession changes faster than a person can think about it. The profession is then propelled into the center of our culture and it makes a dramatic impact on everything. For astronauts, it happened in the 1960s and again in the 1980s because space missions seemed to be our nation’s top priority then. Astronauts captured the imagination of the public, they went to the moon, they performed missions in the space shuttle orbiter, and there was always new technology coming from the space program that was affecting our everyday lives. It was a magical time to be an astronaut. The same sort of thing is happening with the design field and that magical time to be a designer is now.
Maybe designers won’t be going to the moon anytime soon and maybe no one will stand in line for three days to get a designer’s autograph, but just the same, things are changing fast and the whole world is suddenly paying attention to the design profession.
This new recognition is one of the things driving the new “golden days” of design. Educators, engineers, Fortune 500 business leaders, and even governments have recently caught on to the idea that designers can help them when it comes to communicating ideas and producing things people want. The funny thing about it is, we designers have been trying to tell them all this for about 100 or so years, but they were not listening very well… until now.
The other big component that is really pushing the design profession to new heights is the technological evolution. We can work bigger, stronger, faster, and what used to take piles of money and dump truck loads of trained technicians to accomplish, a single designer can do with a laptop and a pot of really strong coffee. To better explain this, let’s look at a few irrefutable examples. It was not all that long ago when illustration and graphic design were completely manual processes. Lettering was done by hand or each individual letter in a headline was placed on a board using a product called “press down type”. Graphic lines and borders were laid out by hand using a product called “line tape”, and all illustrations were done by hand the “old-fashioned way”- with pencils, pens, and paint. While these techniques may have made a designer feel more like Michelangelo, they were tedious and very unforgiving.
Thanks to the Digital Revolution, design work, and the workflow is much simpler and infinitely easier to correct. Back in the near caveman days of graphics a couple of decades ago, mistakes were corrected using special products like correction fluid, painted out, or if the errors were too bad (like a typo in a headline) the designer would need to throw the work away and start over. Now a mistake can be fixed instantly, before going to print. Or if the mistake is beyond revision, you can just delete it, saving the good parts to add to your next attempt.
Nearly the same thing has happened in Photography. Back in the “Bad Old Days” of film photography you were not always certain if the shot came out. If you were smart, you took three versions of the same shot with different settings called bracketing. With the three shots on film, the photographer would have to wait until it was developed (usually by hand) and then look at the negative. Much of the film development process was done in the complete dark, and I don’t mean low light. I mean when you were loading your film into a development tank, a person had to wind the film on a little spiral wire that prevented the undeveloped film from touching any other part of the film or anything else. This was done in complete and total darkness using only the sense of touch. After everything was sealed, you would pour in chemicals and hope you had the timing right.
Once the developing was done, assuming you had the shot you were looking for, it was then off to the darkroom again to make the print. While this process took place only partially in total darkness, it did involve even more smelly chemicals that had a tendency to stain your clothes, your body parts, and anyone else who happened to be in the darkroom with you.
Not only has technology made the manual part of design easier, but it has also made the thinking part more efficient and dramatically influenced the design process.
But the whole half-art/half-alchemy photography fun did not stop there. Retouching photographs was also all done by hand and was a process that required a lot of skill and patience. Typically, photo retouching was done with a tiny brush and a few bottles of ink. Veteran retouchers had learned over the years that the best way to vary the amount of pigment in the retouching ink was with human saliva. This is factual. I am not making this up! They would lick the brush before dipping it in the ink to get something like a medium gray instead of a dark black. You could always tell who the retoucher was in a design shop by all of the little black marks on his tongue.
Related Articles
Testimonial
Technology and Craft
Moonlighting as a Director
The Invasion of the Font People
Tampa Filmmakers Win Big