Chaos Love: love, life, design and more.

Over the last few weeks, I've been filling in my non-working time (of which there's been a little too much lately, unfortunately) by teaching myself CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) design for the web. It's a necessary skill to have as a designer these days, as table-based layouts are very much frowned upon these days. CSS basically helps to separate the content of a site from its style (the way it looks), which makes future design changes and updates easier - in theory! Of course, there's all sorts of little hacks and workarounds that you have to know to make your code work with all browsers, some of which are surprisingly non-standards compliant (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer!).

As I set about my task, it occurred to me that modern graphic designers probably have a higher skill set and have absorbed more jobs than any other job out there. Let me explain...

When I started as a designer over 15 years ago, computers were just starting to gain a foothold in the industry. They were used to create black and white "keyline" artwork that was output by a high-resolution imagesetter, then mounted on board and painstakingly marked up by hand with instructions for the film house. I've lost count of the number of times that I had to write something like, "Enlarge transparency #3 120%, strip transparency to keyline, delete keyline" on the overlay sheet for a piece of artwork - just to get one picture at the right size in the right place. And everything was defined like this: colours, pictures, fills, gradients. In its way, this was the CSS of the day – instructions that gave style to the basic wireframe of the black and white artwork.

Back then, you trusted the film house to interpret these instructions and produce an output that could be used by the printers to make plates for the final printing. But as computers got more powerful and software more sophisticated, more and more work began to be done by the designer, rather than the film house. Files began to be produced with all the colour information and images already included, moving far more of the creative process directly into the designer's hands. In effect, graphic designers started to absorb what was traditionally the role of the film house. They still scanned images and produced the film and proof for printing, but all of the "magic" they used to do was now in our hands. Move forward to now, and film houses all but extinct – artwork now goes directly from designer to printer, where printing plates are made directly from the digital file.

Much the same happened with image retouching. Once Photoshop entered the market, expensive and wizardly "systems work" began to be done by (the much cheaper) inhouse staff, sometimes disastrously, sometimes very well indeed. There's still no substitute for a professional retoucher, but a lot of designers come very close in most instances, especially on a budget.

Then came the internet revolution and a whole new set of skills for designers – web design. Suddenly designers had to know HTML and Flash, and if they knew how to code, even better. Designers who had worked solely in print suddenly had to think in RGB and in terms of time and animation. Of course, the inverse is also true, because there's a whole generation of young designers out there who started in web design and now produce some of the sloppiest finished art for print that has ever been seen.

So... print designer, web designer, image retoucher, film combiner, coder and often concept developer, illustrator and copy writer as well. Not bad for one job, eh?

Posted in: chaosboy, design on April 26, 2009 at at 8:01:00 PM