Graphic design’s future consists of con artists and the fringe
The end is nigh for graphic designers. They are not alone in their misery, joining typists and photo-lab technicians, doomed to the annals of history as a once thriving and useful career.
The democratisation of technology has ushered in cheap access to everyone of the tools of the trade that were once the preserve of advertising agencies. Shutterstock, Macbooks and the Adobe suite of tools, which used to be hellishly expensive, are now available to all and sundry regardless of the size of their business.
Monthly payment options, a genius move from Adobe with their CreativeCloud, has been a boon to the growth of freelancers and small agencies everywhere. And more supply means less demand or downward pressure on prices.
Shutterstock has great prod- uct offerings. They now have a feature that allows anyone to edit photographs directly from the site without having to use an editing programme — a killer offering for social media. Adobe will have to deal with this one real quick.
It allows anyone to bypass designers with a few clicks for any social media work.
The trick is, however, to have a good set of brand guidelines, and this is not something that can necessarily be downloaded from the internet, the big agencies charge big money for that. Oh wait, you could just download a brand manual template from Shutterstock. Some people should be starting to break out in a cold sweat right now.
So, where is there still space for graphic design? Well, the thing with design is that it is an ever-changing art form, and design democracy means any agency worth their salt has to have the guts and the creative ingenuity to create something new and relevant with much shorter turnaround times than ever before — and clients have to be at least as brave and creatively articulate to give the correct guidance. We are in an era that lacks a specific thematic style such as the 20s, 60s and 70s, which makes this all so complicated. There is a bit of a grey area in which everyone is still trying to meld together every great design done over the past few centuries.
New technology and the “maker” economy, together with the unlimited possibilities of 3D printers will set the design trends for the near future, so that will narrow it down a bit.
The design schools are changing their curriculum to make their students relevant for the current human capital needs. Now designers can write code, take photos, write copy, edit images and make short videos. They are mini-agencies and expected to be master of all of these forms.
Graphic designers are no longer constrained by the screen and mouse, they are now constrained by the sheer speed of technology that demands output at warp speed.
This means less time to craft, less time to think and less time to create.
Not many of the older generation of graphic designers are going to make it. It is easier to download a template and adjust a few layers of a ready-made layout than pay for something built from scratch.
What this ultimately does is reduce the value of the offering, the overall value of the trade, and in turn the value designers can ascribe to their output.
The people who are going to take this industry forward and benefit from it are the people who have always done it: the crafters, the con artists and the fringe. Find the fringe and find the next big thing; be a crafter and be known for singleminded purpose; or be a con artist and use powers of perception to bamboozle.
Brand design agencies do have a role to play in the future and that is to create the box that creative people have to work within. These are split into the high-concept creative that will never go away, to the technical roll-out onto assorted elements that can be digitised and templatised. Examples of this robotic design are BrandWizard and D’nA.
Traditional graphic design is dead, some people just do not know it yet. It is terrible for recent design graduates, but even experienced designers are being forced to become digital experts and retool their skills — and not everyone can or wants to.
To succeed, they have to be like a Swiss army knife, even with that weird thing on the back that no one uses, but insists on having.
Salaries will determine what skills are needed and which are no longer as valuable.
So, perhaps it is a wake-up call for the industry to rethink its reason for being.
The irony is that the very tools meant to advance the industry will end up destroying them — Shutterstock, Adobe and Apple could very easily be substituted for the killer machines in Terminator.