Seeing the future again

Yesterday I went to an all-day product demonstration from Adobe, the largest producer of graphics software and the inventor of the Postscript computer language that made laser printers—and the desktop publishing revolution—possible. This “Adobe Creative Suite 4 Roadshow” was intended to show off the latest version of their graphics bundle of software, in the hope it may nudge users to upgrade. In the end, I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu.

Creative Suite is a powerful set of applications which, depending on the specialised bundle, allows designers to do pretty much anything they want in their chosen area—print design, web design, interactive, video or some combination. Many years ago, I went to a Roadshow for an earlier version and they were touting their “design once, publish anywhere” mantra. Quite frankly, they weren’t there yet, but if their demonstrations yesterday are truly representative, I think they may have arrived.

Adobe is first and foremost a company for designers: Its products promise to take the “grunt work” out of the design process to, as they might put it, free the user’s creativity. In my own experience, despite a few missteps along the way, each new version of their software has lived up to that promise.

Adobe claims that their features for preparing files for the web produces “completely clean code” (meaning no errors or extraneous stuff). They stressed in their presentations that designers could take their work to the web, cutting out the “code warriors”. In recent years, the industry has been split: Graphic designers do the creative stuff, then hand it off to web developers (or similar titles) who then re-do the design for the web, sometimes writing the HTML code by hand.

What Adobe is promising—even if only by implication—is that designers will take control of their own work in all its formats, eliminating web developers. Put another way, those creating the content in the first place will control it from start to finish, without handing it off to others.

I’ve seen this before. When I entered the industry, there were two distinct roles—graphic artists and production artists. Graphic artists were usually trained in art schools using traditional methods and media, such as pencil, pen and markers. They came up with designs that were handed to production artists who used the computers of the day, along with manual techniques, to produce what printers needed. Graphic artists couldn’t use computers and production artists were usually trained on the job.

The Apple Macintosh—and especially Adobe Postscript—changed everything. Graphic artists took control over their own production work, taking their designs from concept to print. Production artists adapted to the new technology and began taking over design work, or moving into other areas of printing/publishing. Eventually, the two merged into a single “graphic designer” label, with rankings by “level”, the chief difference being skill with particular software, design ability, creativity and experience.

So here we are again, with Adobe leading the charge as designers take more control over their work. Web developers will, like production artists before them, move into design work or another area (like tech support). The only bad thing I can see is that designers who work for companies are unlikely to see increased pay for the increased responsibilities, but it could mean survival for small firms or freelance designers. And of course it means greater control over content to ensure that the way audiences interact with that content is consistent across all media.

And by the way, Adobe Creative Suite 4 very possibly could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But, I’m just a tad biased, having used their products for over twenty years (and I’ve lived to tell the tale). Evolution in the graphics industry is possible for those who seize the opportunities. I bet that will be true in the future, too.