At the day job, now, I need to start doing "professional development" items. Like reading the InDesign manual to see how I can code XML tags to automate and flow text into forms with the proper style sheets like I can with Xpress. So far, I've learned a lot I didn't know about InDesign (I'm one of those people who learn by doing, reading software manuals is a sure cure for insomnia).
Just a little tidbit about my software capabilities, when I was in between jobs I did register with a few temp agencies. One of them was the Creative Group (
So I need to learn about things that most people that use the software probably don't even know you can do (flow text, apply style sheets, break text over frames, all by using tags - and, yes, I see your designs, you don't know how to do these things). And I need to learn more about Prinergy and Preps, the ripping and page imposition software for the big presses. I know Prinergy a little (enough to get me in trouble), but pagination I'm just a newbie at (I have to do it manually for the plates I set, a legacy of the old ripping software, but Prinergy can output an imposed PDF, and that I can rip).
So for all you youngins out there, even in the same job you need to retrain and update skills. I'm midway through my design career. I was originally trained on how to do paste-up on art boards. We used to present designs using marker layout on black-core boards. All of that is (mostly) gone these days. When I started, the job I do now involved the use of vacu-form tables and ultraviolet light exposures, then composition on golden-rod, then a final burn onto the plate (analog degradation of image was a big concern). Now, digital file to plate, no film intermediary. The world has changed. Not all for the better (the majority of ephemera printed today would never have gotten the approval to print only two decades ago, I know it, our pressmen know it, the client doesn't care). When we get work that reminds us of the older days, we all cherish it.
I hope I'm doing such work for my current client (wood worker). But sometimes I feel like I'm shoveling crap from a desk. Mostly because I'm using substandard photography (but it's all we have, and there's no budget for real photography). Hopefully I can counter that with design, layout, copy, and execution. The world changes.
2 comments:
"the majority of ephemera printed today would never have gotten the approval to print only two decades ago, I know it, our pressmen know it, the client doesn't care"
When I lived in the USSR, I used to argue with one of my Communist (literally card carrying, not these campus wannabes in the US)friends. He was fond of repeating Marx's dictum of "quantity breeds quality". I disagreed. However, I've come to realize that the phenomenon is what we call in biology an "inverted U shaped dose response". As you give more medicine to a subject, the subject gets better, until you reach the optimum dose. As you go beyond it, the side effects begin to poison the subject, and the health curve starts going down the other leg of the upside-down "U".
When an industry starts out, the firms need some practice to get better/. Witness Japanese camera manufacturers in the 1950s, whose product was junk compared to the Germans, but who eqalled or bettered them by the 1980s. Of course, some have let quality slip now in order to cut costs, which poftne happens in big companies pat their primes, and is why I htought my Communist friend was wrong.
Marx was writing (and the USSR, even in the 80s) was existing in a time when more practice meant better products.
We in America are on the other leg of the "U". In the old days, the products fo your design was labor-intensive and expensive. Now that it's easy to make and cheap, crap that would have gotten nixed by management as not worth paying for now gets produced. Cost in the old days help act as a quality filter.
The silver lining is that even on the downslope of the "U" there are lots of places to find quality, you just have to search for it. And the revenues form the junk help subsidize the good stuff - sales of James Frey might help a publisher cut the first advance check for the next Terry Pratchett.
John, thats' exactly right. In our industry, it became so cheap to produce work, it's value went away. Everybody and their grandmother with a Mac and a box of clip set themselves us as a "Graphic Designer." It became harder and harder to convince a client to pay$75+ an hour for professional design when their "nephew just out of high school could do the same thing."
So now we have designers, professionally trained people, who don't understand ink on paper (seriously, thin knocked out text or lines in an area that's all screen value, Dude, process printing, let me show it to you). And the quality of photography has dropped drastically since digital cameras became wide spread. Although I shouldn't yell too much, I've owned digital cameras and used them in design for eight years now. I guess my difference is I understand how photography works (I really want a digital camera that goes beyond f8 aperture and has some modicum of focal length, but a Hasselblad with a digital back is a wee bit out of my price range).
It's kind of like, everybody has fonts on their computers, but how many know the difference between kern and track (or even know you can kern and track)? How many know type theory, how to use it effectively and with purpose? Not many, and when you see it done, you can tell the difference. But most clients just don't care because it'll cost them more.
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