Discussion Question

What new professional fields emerged as a result of the digital and web explosion in the graphic industry?

my response:

     The role of graphic design is much more robust today that it ever has been in the past. “Today’s multimedia technology goes far beyond anything designers had to work with in the past” (Designing without limits) When I sat down to think about the new fields available to graphic designers my list grew quickly in this order; web designer, programer, software engineer, blogging, speculating competitions, information architects, media directors, design consultants, mobil apps, mobil games, computer generated images, digital image manipulation, icon design, digital illustration,  and typeface deign. Looking at this list I am curious how many graphic designers there are out there today that does not have one of these in their job description. It seem that any traditional graphic design career must now embody these “new” fields to some degree at least. 

     Entire new realities have been created with these new fields and the imagination of graphic designers. We now take the idea of an avatar for granted, even the children’s library lets kids created them for their online profile connected to the summer reading program. As users we navigate through the web how we want to be viewed using technology to create characteristics we may not have been given naturally or may not actually poses. Consider A Second Life, in this online game graphic designers “introduce new tasks and functions. In a do-it-yourself customizable world, the creative work is done by users, but the infrastructure has to be conceived to support such productive activity without interference or difficulty.”  (Graphic Design History a Critical Guide) the ideas which made the early multiplayer games so alluring have now been integrated into our online lives to such a degree we expect customizability everywhere. It is really something to consider that A second life was made available to us just five short years ago and now blogs, bloggers, and blog themes, are so common that the themes are unappealing if you can not easily customize it’s layout and add buttons to follow and connect to your other social media network sites. 

     So much is happening so fast. It feels like something is old before market saturation even hits these days. In this weeks lecture I followed a link that lead me to a quote I was so struck by I wrote about it for my blog. “In the postmodern era, as information architects, media directors, design consultants, editor/authors, and design entrepreneurs, we have been chasing after the new and the next to sustain excitement and assert our growing relevance in the world. But inevitably the cutting edge will get dull, and the next wave will be like all the previous waves, and even the new media will become the old media. Then the only thing left will be the graphic design, and what and why we think about it.” (Graphic Design in the Postmodern Era)

works cited

Graphic Design History a Critical Guide, second edition, page 338

History and Analysis of Design, Designing without limits, page 1

Mr. Keedy, Graphic Design in the Postmodern Era, June 14, 1998, web July 20, 2012

My Professors response:

(Source: tiffanyneumann.com)