For Position Only: Where Do We Go From Here?

CreativePro Staff

1

We’re in a muddle. Creative professionals today are in the middle of a big fat muddle, unsure about everything from the economy to their future.

The proof is in abundant research data. According to the Spring 2002 TrendWatch Graphic Arts survey of design and production professionals, we experienced pretty lousy business conditions this past year, and we’re split on whether things will improve in the coming year: 13 percent think business in the next year will be excellent, but 14 percent think business conditions will be much worse than last year; 30 percent think business will be about the same; a preponderance — 54 percent — think next year will be just somewhat worse than last year.

Additional research affirms the ambivalent tone of TrendWatch’s findings. A more subjective but nonetheless telling report from The Creative Group recently compared current employee morale at creative firms to morale a year ago: 35 percent of the ad and marketing executives surveyed said morale was somewhat or much higher; 38 percent said it was somewhat or much lower; 27 percent said it was the same.

Like I said, we’re in a muddle. But while the economy is the obvious source of our malaise — 71 percent of respondents to TrendWatch’s recent survey cited the economy as the greatest challenge the foresee in the next year — I think it goes deeper. I think it has to do with the maturation of our industry. We’re in, essentially, a mid-life crisis.

Our Fine, Fair Youth
Since the beginning of the so-called desktop publishing revolution, new and exciting technology has been pumped into the industry on a regular, frequent basis. At first it was faster microchips that doubled or quadrupled the performance of our Mac Quadras, or the addition of CYMK color support or adjustment layers to Adobe Photoshop. Color scanners, digital cameras, DVD-RWs — these and other devices have come along at breakneck speed, along with technologies such as color management and PDF workflows that have forced us to pretty much constantly reevaluate and refine our design and production processes, and upgrade our software and systems to keep pace with rapid-fire breakthroughs. And of course, in the middle of all these advances to digital print publishing technologies, the World Wide Web exploded before our eyes, bringing with it the whole new ways to deliver content.

It’s really quite astounding. All of these developments and more — digital presses, photo-quality inkjet printers, e-books — have occurred in the last 10 years (20 if you want to count generously). But for perspective remember that for most of the 500 years since the advent of moveable type, type was set by hand, just as Gutenberg did it himself.

Our Maturing Mid Years
But all good revolutions have to come to an end — if they dragged on too long, they’d be evolutions, not revolutions — and ours has. The pace of invention has slowed; the wind has left our sails. Technology advances are now about incremental upgrades, refinements, and agreement upon standards. Yes, things are still getting smaller/faster/cheaper, but we expect that, in fact, demand it happen quickly or we won’t ante up. And we’ll skip this upgrade or that, thank you very much, because we’ve finally got everything working just fine, no conflicts or crashes or bugs, and why spoil a good thing or spend the money with the economy being what it is these days?

From where I stand, there are no "killer apps" out there, nothing exciting or thrilling on the horizon. Even our most venerable vendors — Adobe, Macromedia — are looking past us to new markets: the dreaded enterprise. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the biggest thing going these days is XML, and I have a hard time getting excited about it. XML is not exactly sexy — that’s a word I despise using in the context of technology, but it’s apropos here. We need something to get our blood flowing, our adrenaline pumping, and XML isn’t doing it for me, or for us collectively, I posit. (And that’s why our vendors are setting their sights on another, hopefully more adventurous, market.)

Go Replenish Your Well
The way I see it, we have a few choices. We can continue to sit around, wistfully reminiscing about our wild and carefree youth, or we can metaphorically rush out and wreck our knees on some crazy rock-climbing expedition just to prove our vitality. But I have a better idea: It’s what my mother did when I was 7 and pulling on her apron and saying I was bored. She’d kick me out of the house, make me go outside, and play with the neighbor kids. For grown-up creative professionals, that means going out and reconnecting with what got us excited and engaged with this industry in the first place. This can take many forms, and a great way to start is to come to Seybold Seminars San Francisco this fall. You can check out new products, see and talk to colleagues (instead of passively emailing them), and get ideas and insights from experts who are pushing the limits of today’s (and tomorrow’s) technologies.

If economic realities won’t let you travel to San Francisco, hook up with a local user group for whatever application suits your fancy (InDesign user groups are springing up from New York to Seattle), or cruise around your favorite vendor’s Web site to see if they’re bringing a road show to your town (Adobe, Apple, and Agfa, for starters, do this a lot) — check out creativepro.com’s event listings for more ideas. Or go get some training to learn more about your favorite application or to learn — gasp! — a new one. Or try just a slightly new and different approach to an old project — such as giving digital short-run printing a whirl, as I suggested in my last column.

The point is, we have to fill up our creative wells, and the best way to do this is by getting out among people with the same interests we have, and by shaking up our routines even just a little bit. With any luck, this will rekindle our love of creative technologies, and who knows, maybe even XML will start to gain some appeal.

Read more by Anita Dennis.