How are Digital Technologies affecting the practice of Graphic Design?

Since the 1980s, digital methods have played an increasingly influential role in graphic design. Increasingly advanced versions of design software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and InDesign have made available creative and manipulatory techniques which would be near impossible to achieve through any other medium. Also, as David Crow states in his 2008 article Magic box: craft and the computer, ‘the computer can very effectively introduce play; digital media, with their instant reversibility and ability to simulate, can withstand sustained experimentation where other formats would disintegrate.’ This opportunity to experiment without risk of wasting resources enables infinite room for error, removing a potentially crippling creative obstacle from the design process.

Aside from the advances in specifically design-based software, other digital advances play their part in the design process. The speed of communication achieved by email means that designer and client can exchange drafts and ideas instantaneously, ensuring the client gets the desired work in minimal time.
However, concerns have been raised over the way digital technologies themselves are advancing. Crow says that when it comes to digital design, ‘some educators worry that students will do what predetermined tools make easy’ – settling for the use of creative techniques programmed into the software for a specific purpose, rather than seeking the ideal visual response themselves. Perhaps the ideal digital designer should also be able to design the software they use to create imagery – to create their own tools.

One often overlooked, but crucial element of digital media, is the use of the “import” and “export” commands. In his 2008 essay Import/Export, Lev Manovich claims that ‘“import” and “export” commands of graphics, animation, video editing, compositing, and modeling software are historically more important than the individual operations these programs offer’ – that the compatibility between programs suited for different purposes is a greater advance than any process a given program can achieve on its own. Manovich says that ‘the whole field of motion graphics as it exists today came into existence to a large extent because of the integration between vector-drawing software, specifically Illustrator, and animation/compositing software such as After Effects.’ He also claims that this compatibility ‘plays the key role in shaping visual and spatial forms of the software age.’
Whereas before, filmmakers, graphic designers, and animators created visually separate and identifiable pieces of work, ‘contemporary designers use the same set of software tools to design everything.’ This means that contemporary digital design of any format can share the same kinds of appearance, and that if viewing images of design, ‘in most cases it’s impossible to identify the origins of the images unless you read the captions. Only then do you find that this image is a poster, that one is a still from a music video, and this one is magazine editorial.’

Still from the Cyanide and Happiness animation, Doctor's Visit: http://www.explosm.net/comics/1714/

Cyanide and Happiness web comic: http://www.explosm.net/comics/155/

Perhaps controversially, some people take the position that design software may be developing and accumulating too fast to properly evolve. Kenya Hara suggests in his 2007 book Designing Design, that ‘technology ought to evolve more slowly and steadily. It would be best if it took the time to mature, through trial and error’, in order for us to extract the greatest assets of each development, while replacing or removing the aspects which don’t work.

In his entry to the blog Design Observer in 2006, entitled Designing our own Graves, Dmitri Siegel presents the sinister idea that the sheer amount of customization options presented to the general public in many aspects of life – social networking sites, mobile phones and t-shirt designs, to name but a few – is severely affecting the demand for designers of all kinds. Siegel calls this phenomenon ‘prosumerism – simultaneous production and consumption.’ He suggests that prosumerism has given rise to ‘the templated mind’, which ‘searches for text fields, metatags, and rankings like the handles on a suitcase. Data entry and customization options are the way prosumers grip this new generation of products. The templated mind hungers for customization and the opportunity to add their input’.
Siegel identifies two of the hardest-hit areas of design as book and music album cover art. Websites such as Amazon.com – with user-created feedback and ranking systems – undermine the selling power that a striking book cover would have given in the past. As a result, ‘the budget that once went into design fees is already being redirected to manipulating search criteria and influencing Google rankings.’ Similarly, music downloading software such as iTunes renders album artwork almost obsolete – ‘the MP3 format and the ubiquity of downloading has shrunk the album art canvas to a 200 x 200-pixel JPEG.’
Seigel observes that through prosumerism, the public ‘ are actually consuming [their] own labour’, leaving little need for professional designers. This presents the worrying concept that ‘unless designers come up with more answers, they may end up designing-it-themselves...and little else.’

Screen grab from music downloading site http://www.napster.co.uk/ showing album art.

Perhaps, in her call for a new, digital avante-garde movement, Jessica Helfand provides designers with a new direction to take their skills. Her 2001 essay Dematerialisation of Screen Space explains that ‘the world of the internet has its own peculiar galaxy, with its own constellations of information, its own orbits of content. And it is by no means flat.’ This draws attention to a major limitation of current design software products, namely that they ‘remain essentially rooted in the finite world of printed matter: most are based on editing and publishing models and, not surprisingly, have a page-oriented display system’. Helfand seeks to expose the possibilities of the practically infinite canvas that is the internet, boldly claiming that, ‘as designers, we might begin to tackle the enormous opportunities to be had in staking claim to and shaping a new and unprecedented universe. There, if anywhere, lies the new avant-garde.’


References.

David Crow ~ Magic Box: Craft and the Computer, Eye no. 70 vol. 18 Winter 2008

Kenya Hara - Desiging Design, Translated by Maggie Kinser Hohle and Yukiko Naito. Baden: Lars Müller, 2007

Jessica Helfand and John Maeda - Dematerialization of Screen Space, in Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001, 35 - 39

Lev Manovich - Import/Export, or Design Workflow and Contemporary Aesthetics, March 2008, http://www.manovich.net

Dmitri Siegel - Designing Our Own Graves, Design Observer blog, June 27, 2006. http://www.designobserver.com