The three-decades-old conversion of print design and production brought about by digital publishing, stock art, free fonts, and internet bulk printers has ineffably reduced the quality of the creative product—but almost no one seems to care. And who can blame them?
An old saw in the publishing business defined the value—the cost—of services. One can choose Price, Quality, or Speed, but you can only choose two. The parameters of those factors were understandable before PageMaker changed them irrevocably in 1990.
The role of the art director, commanding the forces of typesetters, production artists, color separators, photographers, illustrators, proofers, and printers to the purpose of creative editorial design, has been greatly diminished as these bespoke businesses were replaced by inexpensive computers and off-the-shelf software that allowed untrained designers to approximate the skills only they could supply. As time went on, technology advanced in sophistication, and the internet created opportunities to provide stock fonts, images, and clip art, and these vendors became relics of the analog age.
In the Medieval Age, apprentices worked in guilds to learn skills, customs, and trade secrets. These guilds wielded enormous power because they held precious, exclusive knowledge. Design and production used to be like that. It used exclusive tools, machines, techniques, and processes beyond the understanding or skill of the people who used the product. Members of a trade shared a common argot and a passion for their work. Competitors had to strive for quality and value and expand the skills of their employees.
For a century, these vendors produced products necessary for publishers. Then, in the space of half a decade, most of their business disappeared. Typesetters became service bureaus which, in turn, were rendered obsolete by PDF workflows. Digital transparency scanners put traditional color separators out of business, and then digital photography and Photoshop eliminated the scanners. The expansion of digital workflows eliminated the need for expensive proofs, the shooting, and stripping of negatives for burning printing plates, and ultimately, even the need for offset printing itself.
Yet, knowledge of typography, photo imaging, or print preparation for printers are still skills that separate the self-taught from the true professional. And where it once required the abilities of three or four vendors to perform the magic of getting things into print, all those parts of the process have been dumped onto often-untrained designers. Computers and software may produce a similar product, but often without the knowledge or nuance that came from a specialized practice of skills. The results, as one might expect, are often lacking.
Understanding typographic nuances such as kerning, word and letter tracking, ligatures, alternate glyphs, even gray color, tight rags, proper leading (pronounced led-ding, not leed-ing), and proper use of tabular and oldstyle numerals are only a few elements that result in beautiful, consistent typography. Many people don’t know how to make that happen, and many more don’t even know what those terms mean.
The truth is that these programs can produce sophisticated typography, but many users lack the knowledge of what to do—or even where in the program—to apply them. And, even worse, most people don’t know what they don’t know and don’t care.
When there is no alternative but to use specialized vendors, there is a built-in quality factor. To compete in business, a typesetter had to set excellent type to order; a good color separator had to make images that were consistently printed with “snap.” But many clients don’t have quality as their main priority.
That leads us back to the triad of Price, Quality, and Speed. What if you changed the parameters and the cost of typesetting was literally one-twentieth the cost? What if color separations and image corrections become nearly free? And, what if you could cut the turn-around on work from three days to three hours? What if you could do all the work of producing publications in-house on equipment that was one-hundredth the cost of previous technology and use your own people to do the work?
Back in the late ’80s, people who understood printing craft and technology—how the sausage was made—realized until the rest of the industry caught up, you could market your products at the rates of the old technology (or even offer a hefty discount.) Because my background included working at printers and typesetters and my nerdy fascination with new technology, I realized AURAS was poised to leverage the paradigm shift. But only because we already had the craft skills to produce quality work. The challenge in those days was proving that we could produce work that rivaled—or was even better—than conventional vendors, but more cheaply and more quickly.
For AURAS, it changed the studio forever. After having bought one workstation, we produced a conference course catalog for the National Association of Social Workers that we billed at two-thirds the cost of the previous year’s typesetting costs and still made enough on that one job to buy a second workstation. Our typesetting costs had changed from $15,000 to $500. The next year, we charged half, and by the third year, we had to roll the cost into the general page rate—other design firms had caught up. That didn’t mean they could produce work of the same quality AURAS could, but the client didn’t care. It was all about speed and cost.
But even after three decades and generations of improvements in computers, software, and workflows undreamed at the beginning, there is still a huge gap in the skills of designers who now have only themselves to rely upon for improving their understanding of typesetting, color correction, layout, and production.
There are dozens of instances where AURAS has taken over projects begun by other designers. We get raw files from freelancers to in-house employees to other design studios. In most cases, the designers use the software’s default settings instead of learning how to customize the work they produce. Over the last decade, every single project we have assumed could be improved by more expertise with the software and a better understanding of the craft.
And yet, in almost all of these projects, the reason we took over the jobs was not that the clients were unhappy with the typography or the images or other production elements. It was because the original vendors were too slow or too expensive, or the clients were frustrated with the lack of attention being paid to the job.
Is it still too much to ask that designers develop advanced craft skills with the programs they use every day? Shouldn’t professionals know how to improve the quality of the products they produce using the features in the software? We have never hired an employee with a skill set that did not need improvement—even though most rated their skills as advanced.
Obviously, the condition still exists today. Whenever I see unsexed quotes or hyphens where em dashes should be (Rachel Maddow Show, I am talking to—you) or images that 10 seconds in Photoshop could make pop, I want to cringe. Even worse, a lack of craftsmanship has extended into all aspects of publishing. It is all too common to see typos, bad punctuation, and poor writing littering websites strewn with inappropriate stock art.
Even a recent NEWSMAX commercial on MSNBC had a typo in its tagline—“reals news for real people.” Wouldn’t you think someone there would notice? It took two months before it changed.
