“Back in the day”, as the old folks tend to say, we had it tough. This means, in design terms, no computers.
Hard to believe for the contemporary graphic designer, whose hand, at rest, assumes the curve of cupping a mouse and whose eyes are only attuned to screen colours. Yup, old-school designers did everything by hand. Drawing, painting, cutting, pasting. Letraset, chromatec, renderings in markers, bromides, frisket stencils and airbrushes. Laborious, time-consuming, inefficient, with no room for error and no undo command.
The computer, by comparison, can create magic in an instant. An infinite colour palette at your fingertips. Any image you want a Google search away. Don’t like that type? Twist it, stretch it, flip it; as easy as a single function selection. Actually, the magic is so easy, you don’t need any training at all to be able to use it. With the right creative suite of programmes these days, anyone can be a designer.
So do I regret not having been born 20 years later, when becoming a designer was so much less labour intensive? Not a chance.
Not that I am a masochist – I’m all for the easier way out and by no means miss the hours spent in smelly darkrooms making bromides. But my training left me with skills and abilities and a critical eye that I doubt I would have developed otherwise.
I still think with a pencil, can spot bad letter-spacing at ten metres and know colour because I’ve mixed it as paint. I’m not saying that we were better designers in those days; today’s whizz kids are amazing and their digital skills have put them into a creative space that I still only tentatively venture into. Personally, though, I’m grateful for the skills that my training left me with, archaic though they may be.
I also think that the tough, almost more physical nature of becoming a designer “back in the day” has left me with a deeper respect and love for my craft than the more superficial training of today leaves you with. In my old-fashioned way, I’m still far more of a fan of substance over slickness. Making things look good is such a limited skill.
And while I do spend most of the day gazing mesmerised at a computer screen, I am still at my happiest when I can get the old pencil and paper out and stretch those old, somewhat atrophied, creative muscles again.