Referring to desktop publishing as “professional” graphic design undermines, cheapens and commoditizes the practice of graphic design(ers) at large.
Sign of the Times
The signs are everywhere; advertisements for logos, web sites, brochures, marketing materials and other “products” for pennies on the dollar and the promise of completion in some arbitrary amount of time. They wave on banners in shopping malls, strip centers, hole in the wall start-ups and on the web, even in well-respected and well designed venues, through the use of GoogleAds or AdSense, touting their credibility and nesting into the minds of consumers. Whether a vinyl sign with bullet points, or a glossy bobble with obligatory drop-shadow, they advertise logos for $250.00, websites for $275.00, XHTML in 8 hours, 1000 business cards for $100.00 or some other seemingly random price point – what amounts to graphic design “spam”. You’ve probably even seen advertisements like, “How do I become a graphic designer?” by some random technical college.
What the advertisers of these signs don’t realize is that by listing the services and corresponding price and time frame they are creating confusion among would be consumers about what they should reasonably expect for those services, not to mention missing an opportunity to engage in a more thorough evaluation of what those consumers could benefit from, i.e. branding, engaging consumers through multiple avenues, a clear and consistent message among others. In the context of a large design community, with the potential to do a large amount of work for various kinds of businesses and individuals, this practice commoditizes and devalues the graphic design industry at large. But even more importantly, it reduces the intrinsic value of the products we create; the unseen imprint or emotional connection they can and often do create.
Software and Education Will Not Save Us
“…the lack of mastering typographic skills, the knowledge of appropriate type and its articulation being tantamount to producing good graphic design, is where desktop publishing always fails…”
Lacking Passion
From Experience
salaries for a junior designer with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design is low, even when the demand is high. It literally takes years for a designer starting out in the industry to earn enough to make a good living, much less raise a family. What’s worse is the gap in the salaries between the upper management, principals, partners and creative directors, and the middle and lower management, art directors, senior designers and designers. To some extent, these insufficiencies are attributable to gains realized by less experienced, less qualified desktop publishers, known to charge $50–$75 per hour. One might say these potential gains are irrelevant, but collectively, the sum of them could be transferred to firms employing a few junior designers. The junior designers would gain valuable experience and as a result, the final product would be better. Instead, the design industry suffers.
Cross-marginalization
Erosion Factor
How many times has someone approached you and asked, “Hey, don’t you do graphics (yes, plural) design type advertising desktop publishing stuff?”
In Conclusion
Desktop publishers are errantly characterizing themselves as professional graphic designers. They should be forthright with communications to clients in terms of expectations and amend their business models so that pricing structures fall below that of professional design firms, abstaining from commoditizing design by listing services and delivery time frames. Likewise, entities practicing professional graphic design services should continue to migrate to the strategic level, employing strategists or business analysts where appropriate. Perhaps certification or accreditation, much like architecture and interior design, is warranted. I am not for certain, but the idea is to elevate the practice beyond its current misconceptions. How many times has someone approached you and asked, “Hey, don’t you do graphics (yes, plural) design type advertising desktop publishing stuff?”.
Truthfully, the general population has no idea what we do. The goal is to widen the gap between desktop publishing and professional graphic design to the extent that the results of the products we create are self-evident; educating the public that our professional practice is a discipline that requires talent, skill and education, that it creates awareness for issues, brings order and thereby understanding to information, and ultimately adds value to our lives.
Tags: desktop publishing, microsoft, software pirating, templates, typography
Unfortunately Daren, you have nailed it in many ways… Coming at this from the Graphic Design education angle, I couldn’t agree more… I realize each day that I teach, more and more the opportunities students miss to learn by doing by hand or taking on a intern experience to gain first-hand knowledge of a process is thrown away… and instead these students think that the mere existence of a computer and computer software (easy to download, cheap and or “free”) makes them believe they can be designers… ah the ever prevalent “design is a button” curse…
Yes, the answer is education, but as everything fogs over into a plethora of multi-mediated (sic) post post prosumer digital-ization, it is the education that ultimately gets swept under the carpet… Is there time? Who has time? We do and we don’t… and it is a sham(e)… the issue seems so deep and so perplexing it makes me believe that we need a true dismantling of culture to reinvigorate a belief of quality over quantity… This is, of course, the same old argument you and I have discussed before… how do WE insure quality? How do we insure people see “great” design? How doe we identify “bad” design? And for now the answer might be to live (and design) hyperlocally… Do what you can where you are with a passion, inform when you can, and over time, hopefully it will change…
In the last few years of teaching my methods have greatly changed from one of initially teaching technique and methods to “seeing”… How do I as a professor teaching a very very limited number of classes in graphic design get the guts of graphic communication into these new recruits? My interim answer is by exposing them to as much “good” design as possible and trying to revalue, for them, material design, texture, substance, concept… my hope is that if I can instill in them an understanding that “everything” a designer (and artist) does has the potential to have meaning in his or her making, then that knowledge, that way of seeing will hopefully bleed over into these students/future-designers tackling of new process, techniques and/or job challenges… The ultimate thank you from a student is when she says, “Wow, I see now the work that went into that… I realized I was wrong about my notion of using the computer…” More and more my job is to de-program students from all the visually culturally constructed cliches and garbage they see every day, every second, every moment… Can we create a design filter or glasses that only allows students to see good design and blocks out bad design during their education at a university? I doubt it. But until we change the culture of seeing, bad will always remain fab… and this is unfortunately at the cost of cutting design that has substance, valued effort and consideration.
Perhaps required reading for all should be: “Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure and Lessons Learned” edited by Steven Heller
-Ray
"Design Disasters: Great Designers, Fabulous Failure and Lessons Learned"