I’m not sure why I torture myself like this, but I was reading AdWeek again, and found this article about the struggles of print designers moving to digital. The article itself is a sort of sad commentary on a silly war I thought ended 10 years ago:
digital = new kids;
print = old guys in suits.
But that aside, it got me thinking again a question I’ve had for years: why is it assumed that there is a direct line from print to digital any way? The relationship between print and digital is about as close as print and architecture.
My question is – why don’t people draw a line from industrial design to digital?
After all, these two disciplines have far more in common. The relationship between aesthetic design and engineering. The concept that the thing you’re creating will be used in a place and in a way that you can’t control. And finally, the concept that something can be iterated over time.
Looking at digital products as product design efforts would have, I believe, a profound, and profoundly positive impact on the way work gets done, especially in the marketing space. It would release agencies from the mental model of a system that no longer seems to produce meaningful work. New team dynamics would emerge, new types of clients relationships would form, notions of timelines would be recreated, and new (and I believe more important) concepts of success would necessarily rise up.
So any way – why is it people seem to pair up print and digital?
THANK YOU…for sure they are tied way to close together.
I very much consider myself to be an almost exclusively print focused designer. Although, under this umbrella of print I also place brand development/design as I still believe it is tied more to the world and ideals of print than web. But unless you consider 25 to be old and jeans/tee to be a suit then I might be fucking up your generalization a bit.
Digital design places far more emphasis on the content & portability than print does due to the MASSIVE amount of people that can see it on other platforms. Because of this I see digital as more of a communication device than print (my college professors would be pissed if they heard me say that) but maybe working in a digital environment I’ve just come to associate the two more closely. For me print is all about the minute details that digital, usually, doesn’t give you the time to digest and appreciate.
Print and digital get lumped together simply because we are in a transitional phase in design history and theory right now. Most current design instructors are based in the old-school whereas their students are usually going out and getting jobs in the new-school environment. They are therefore taught with the ideals set with print design (a flaw from my point of view). There are becoming more programs with a purely digital focus but most programs all start with a basis in print. (Sorry but trade schools like the Art Institute don’t count as teaching design theory at all from what I’ve seen produced from them)
Bottom line is that I totally agree with what you’re saying about looking at it as more of a functional product than traditional print design. Digital has to actually be functional on more than the ‘it looks good and has a good message’ level, otherwise its not successfully doing its job as a communication tool.
This whole thing is ironic though seeing as I work for an exclusively web based company doing almost exclusively print/graphic based work
In my mind the design part on digital surfaces and arenas have been ignored for all this time, applying decorational elements in order to enhance the logical structure of the application instead of building experiences and identities based on an understanding of the craft.
Luckily, as technology disappears into the background, and stops driving all the processes, we will look forward to a time where the understanding of the craft of design will start re-emerging and we will see great design work online as well.
As Donald Norman points out: Every time new technology emerges we tend to forget everything we know and start over from scratch.
It is interesting that in this film for WIRED tablet magazine, Chris Anderson points to just that fact, that instead of using engineered designers to build UX’s with usability and logic, they invited their print designers in to create experiences.
Link: http://is.gd/aXR4t
I hope what we are seeing now, as technology disappears as a barrier between people and content, designers and surfaces, is the end of decoration. Which has been the standard online for a long time, and start seeing the craft of design emerging on arenas based on digital technology.
Best
Helge