You would have thought that I’d insulted the Queen. But no, I simply critisied that bible of D&AD, ‘the book’. I had suggested that a book form was no longer fit for that particular task. A Digital format would be better. My thoughts migrated to Creative Review, D&AD, a plethora of designer’s blogs and Tweets and became a catalyst for a lively debate on print vs. digital.
This got me thinking. There can be few areas of our creative world that haven’t been profoundly affected by the digital age. The traditional ‘craft ‘based disciplines have been displaced, jettisoned or revolutionised by digital; artwork, typesetting, retouching, photography, printing, illustration, and moving image.
The same applies to architecture, engineering, product design and textiles. Television, radio, phones, music, navigation and increasingly books and magazines are all now delivered digitally. Soon most cinemas will be projecting digitally. No more vans ferrying reels of celluloid. The old time projectionist will be ‘let go’ for space saving simple digital projectors. No scratches, sound distortion, colour problems. Perfect every time. The shooting of movies is increasingly on HD digital. Cinematographers, like their stills counterparts, have had to embrace the digital form. Film stock will become a quirky niche item akin to letterpress printing. And the revival of vinyl, brought about by DJs, has now been packed back into their weathered flight boxes. The convenience of digital is biting.
If all this sounds like a lament for the past it is not. Unlike many of my contemporaries, who take pride in the fact that they can’t even turn a computer on let alone use one, I have embraced the digital world. I find it odd that there is often a reaction against it. At best it is ill informed and at worst it is just nostalgic claptrap. Much of what we love from the past is viewed through rose tinted spectacles. On close inspection many of those old graphic favourites have a low Tech crudity, which may have charm, but they don’t hold up to the exactitudes of today’s digital standards.
But to the new generation of graphic designers, bottle fed on digital, our analog past has a fascination and a nostalgia for something they never experienced, hence the increasing popularity of letterpress and screen printing. Getting your hands dirty in nasty oil based inks feels like you really are crafting it.
Here is a group of young creative things from 1978 having fun at the then Paddington Institute. For a mear £2.85 you could sign up for a whole term. Those were the days.
My own teenage daughter has resurrected my old filofax, Pentax SLR and iPod classic (yes even early digital has a ‘cool’ nostalgia) they all have an eccentric allure. And it has ever been thus. Plundering the past is a way of creating a new today.
Thanks to the digital age trawling our graphic heritage has never been easier. The proliferation of graphic geeks has seen sharing stuff snowball. With sites like FFFFound!, Flicker and the myriad of blogs available. What would have taken months or years to unearth in the analog age is available at the click of a mouse.
This instant gratification has a more profound affect. National graphic styles, once so distinctive; Swiss, Dutch, British, French, Scandinavian and American etc are diminishing. We can now see exactly what everyone is doing as they finish it wherever they are in the world. This has democratised those old nationalistic trends. But in turn it has enriched and created more variety to the 21st century graphic landscape.
But, there is one thing that digital can’t provide and that’s the ‘idea’. That is a God given thing.
Cartoon by the great R.O.Blechman
Artical by Mike Dempsey. Reprinted from Design Week April 2011
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