For Design, It Was Standing Room Only
Taking a last stroll around Boston last Friday (the last day of Seybold Seminars Boston 2001), I was nearly flattened by a teenaged skateboarder on Newbury Street. After the near miss, he deftly diffused my building ire with a smile, a tip of his backwards Red Sox hat, and a chipper “Terribly sorry!” before zipping off down the sidewalk.
As I watched him go — his lanky, adolescent body parts struggling madly to work together, but occasionally pulling off some pretty “fly” moves almost in spite of himself — I was struck suddenly with two back-to-back thoughts: “That kid is a good metaphor for what has been happening at Seybold for the last week,” and “Ohmigod, do I ever need to quit thinking about work.”
The metaphor goes something like this: Publishing is entering a period of adolescence between paper and pixel, wherein the community as a whole is finally hitting its stride in working in print and on the Web, but it’s dealing with an influx of “hormones” — futurists predicting a dramatic growth spurt, which means we’ll have to adapt to structuring our work for multiple methods of digital output.
Seybold Seminars plays the part of the favorite uncle, taking our metaphorical adolescent out a few times a year and imparting some pearls of wisdom while offering a brief but educational respite from the perils of growing up. The trick, as with any teenager, is that in order to keep their attention and respect, the “favorite uncle” must toe the line between “relating with” and “lecturing to.” At the Hynes Convention Center this last week, I fear that “Uncle Seybold” may have spent too much time on the un-cool side of that line.
All in Due Time
While it’s been longer than I care to admit since I’ve been a teenager, the fact that my four siblings are all more than 10 years older than I am means I have been subjected to their well-intended but almost parental advice for my entire life. I didn’t always listen and would sometimes come to wish I had, but I often just wasn’t ready for whatever wisdom they were dispensing. The same is true for our dear “Uncle Seybold.”
For last week’s “educational respite,” Uncle Seybold took us on a journey filled with events many of us were not really ready for. Three key areas of focus during last week’s event were e-books, digital rights management (DRM), and e-content management. Granted, DRM is a hot-button issue at present, but the software is tough to demo, most of it is still in development, and the call to integrate it into the publishing workflow has not yet been heard. Many of the vendors offering DRM solutions reported light traffic in their booths but chalked it up to the general economic climate, and to being at the leading edge of the coming DRM wave. Probably, too, with prospective DRM clients wrestling with their business plans, including an unfortunate trend toward eliminating content altogether, DRM seems like a back-burner issue. If you have no content, you hardly need to protect it.
Nor has the day of the e-book truly arrived. Microsoft, Palm, Adobe, goReader, Gemstar, and Franklin Electronics were touting their upcoming solutions for the e-book space, but all of them acknowledged that they didn’t expect e-books to really take off until, at the very least, we see a real leap forward in display technology. And after that our society as a whole has to make a dramatic psychological shift from a medium — paper — that has been “in development” for thousands of years to one that has been around for only a few. There is undoubtedly tremendous utility down the road for e-books in our information-rich age, especially in education, but Uncle Seybold got a little ahead of the game by spending so much energy on a topic that even the most optimistic estimates don’t see fully blooming for the next two years.
In this most recent Seybold, sessions that involved projections of what is to come were generally interesting, but perhaps projection-heavy topics would be better relegated to small sessions until they are closer to being something we need to think about sometime in the next few months, if not today. No more of this “in only two more years now, you’ll see…” Granted, it’s cool to grab a telescope and take a glimpse of the long view, but spotlighting the potential future all over the show floor is too much.
It’s the Designers, Stupid
We, the metaphorical teenager, arrive at Uncle Seybold’s house. We’re carrying a PowerBook with Photoshop stickers on it and a copy of Communication Arts, and wearing a Macromedia T-shirt. Hoping to engage us in a mutually interesting conversation, what should Uncle Seybold talk about? The stock market? Cooking? No, of course, he should talk about design.
- The stock market
Many of the sessions this time revolved around business strategies: “Dot Bombs,” “Has Consolidation Killed Innovation,” “Why Dot-Coms Fail…”, etc. I attended those and several others with the same bent, and the rooms were never even close to half full. Where was everybody? - Cooking
Likewise, while many vendors in the content-management, e-book, and DRM spheres lamented little interest from attendees, not to mention Noosh’s perpetually deserted online printing booth, the exhibitors featuring graphics hardware or software — Adobe, Corel, Epson, and Wacom (among a few others) — reported a light but steady flow of traffic through their booths. Interestingly, the Mercedes-Benz booth was also well attended. - Design!
The Seybold Seminars organizers routinely survey the show visitors to get a picture of just who’s coming to their party. In last Thursday’s “The Daily” (Seybold’s daily tradeshow magazine), it was reported that almost 40 percent of attendees label themselves as designers, producers, or production leaders, with 11 percent of the remainder being marketing or salespeople, and a meager 8 percent representing Information Technology. In addition, 46 percent of attendees work for design firms, ad agencies, and prepress houses with fewer than 100 employees, with 60 percent doing Web-related work and 55 percent involved in print. And 22 percent are involved in “producing or managing digital media and video.”The conference sessions that were popular included the Adobe keynote and the Quark event, the “Next Generation Displays” session, and “Building Brands,” as well as “3 Web Site Makeovers” and most of the Apple how-to sessions and primers on PDF and color management in OS X. And of course the last event in the last hours of the last day of Seybold was the one that had Seybold VP of Content Craig Cline up on the stage, shouting “Where have you all been?!?!” to the overflow crowd waiting to see the “Design Dream Team” event (which was delayed for 15 minutes so the staff could round up several dozen more chairs). The “Dream Team” included renowned designers David Carson, Clement Mok, and Roger Black, all of whom talked extensively about their work and methodologies, and answered a steady stream of questions from an eager and exuberant crowd.The message is clear: Our teenager wants to talk about skateboarding.
Between Now and San Francisco
The next Seybold Seminars event will be held September 24 to 28 in San Francisco. I’m hoping Seybold SF will see show-floor presences from the likes of Apple, Macromedia, Extensis — maybe even Quark — and other purveyors of wares that enable creative professionals to work more efficiently and keep pace with technology as it emerges. It would also be great to see developers who target other areas of the Seybold audience, namely the digital video space. As revealed in the Seybold Survey, more than 20 percent of attendees identify themselves with digital video, yet there was minimal vendor presence for that group.As for the conferences, perhaps there should be somewhat of a return to basics there as well. In the “Dream Team” session, two items that generated the biggest responses concerned typography and the lapse of training in design schools today on the fundamentals of print.
Our “Uncle Seybold” has some time to plan a “return to cool” event that will engage, excite, and educate the rapidly maturing body that is our community. We hope he pulls through with all the energy and wisdom we’ve come to expect.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on April 19, 2001
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