Perhaps the worst and most inaccurate ideas originally promoted by publishing software makers was “What You See Is What You Get.” WYSIWYG, or “whizzy-wig” seemed like the greatest thing, a visual interface that mimicked analog paste-up. It promised production designers that they already knew how this new-fangled software worked. The operator demonstrating PageMaker “imported” text onto the virtual “pasteboard” next to the magazine “spread” and ever=so-hesitantly moved it onto the “page.” Yes, one could do it, but back then the concept of WYSIWYG was a marketing tool more than a reality—a promise that one day it would change the way you would work without changing the way you worked.
At the end of 1988 AURAS got a Hanukkah present—a MACII with a scanner, a whopping 4 megs of RAM and a 40 meg hard drive, an Ikegami monitor (we couldn’t afford the Sony Trinitron,) a scanner, and a PC floppy reader. It was a breeze to set up and within an hour, after loading a dozen or so floppy disks, PageMaker was lit up and ready for design.
There it was. A blank “page” ready for whatever I wanted to put on it. It only took a few minutes to assemble a small six-panel brochure for a client. I typed the copy into the program and then bit by bit I moved it onto the page, styled it with the few Postscript fonts available, and positioned the elements where I wanted them. I scanned in some book covers and put those in too. It was such a successful test of the new equipment that I printed out the brochure on the LaserWriter and sent it to the client. This was just two days after the boxes showed up on our doorstep.
Later that day she called me and angrily said that if she had wanted me to order type from the typesetter and paste-up the brochure, she would have told me, and under no circumstances would she pay for it. It took a bit to convince her that this was just a comp that came out of a computer with no cost to her. That’s when I knew that desktop publishing would change our studio forever. All you had to do was pretend the image on the screen was a real piece of artboard and just move every element exactly where you wanted it—no typesetter, no stat camera, no paste-up.
A few months went by, and we began to master using PageMaker for production. It was too clumsy for design, and we only had one workstation, but it was great for creating comps and proofs. Learning the efficient and by-the-book way to use the program to create pages required a large commitment to understand how the settings could be tweaked for best results. By using our typography and prepress skills, we made better, more accurate documents.
One day, after a new update to PageMaker was installed, I found that very first file and opened it up. What a mess it was. Dozens of text boxes, all tweaked horizontally to make the text wrap manually. Paragraphs were spaced by making separate text boxes and vertically separating them by eye. Book images were all tilted slightly off, were different sizes, and wrapped around the text awkwardly. WYSIWYG had its limitations. You did get what you saw, but that was no guarantee what you got was well-made.
Whizzywig is a marketing tool the way that a free taste of heroin is for a drug dealer. Once you’re hooked it can turn out to be a disaster. Or one can learn a valuable lesson and realize there is no substitute for fully understanding the features of a program and using them to do all the difficult work that ends up looking good on the page—or wherever.
Web design programs have been marketed the same way. For years, many tools were created to build websites without knowing how to code, promising WYSIWYG pages. Just like PageMaker. Just like Quark. They worked but didn‘t address the underlying concerns of how to produce a competent UX. Today, sites like WIX and Squarespace now allow an amateur to build a site using a premade template locked to their platform with limited capabilities to tweak the site. For many, that is enough, but for professionals, those are overly simple production tools that ignore powerful features built into HTML5.
WordPress, however, is a powerful website creation tool, and like all of the marketing that has preceded it, creating pages without having to code has become more and more part of its appeal, supported by sophisticated third-party plug-ins. Like an earlier generation of print-oriented software, the lure of real-time interactive page layout is still a marketing point. But all the elements of a web page are way more complex than anything InDesign was ever meant to do. If you want to promote yourself as a professional designer you have to master your tools. Otherwise, you‘re just a musician plunking a few notes on a synthesizer and letting it fill in the real music-making.
There is no substitute for mastering the technical and aesthetic skills of design programs, both the how and the why. To produce excellent results one needs to fully understand their capabilities and their interface. WYSIWYG is a canard that implies one doesn’t need to put in the real effort of learning how things work, and it’s TWWTL—The Worst Way To Learn.
