Print departments – Graphic Design – part 1
Print departments – Graphic Design – part 1 – 11th March 2009
Twenty years ago most designers would work out their initial concepts on paper, with coloured pencils, pastels, magic markers, Letraset, and story boards. Now, of course, with Macintosh being the main design tool numerous variations of concepts can be achieved far more quickly. There are benefits to this but also quite a few drawbacks too.
The benefits are pretty obvious; concepts can be worked up to a highly finished state even at the way early stages of design. No need for the previously essential magic maker scamps or pencil drawn scribbles, although even now, some of more experienced designers around still like to go through this process.
The biggest problem that I see associated with developing early concepts on the Macintosh screen is that it is so easy to produce numerous variations of a theme, readily being able to change fonts, typographic style, format, or colour schemes that it can sometimes make it harder to develop a single focused concept.
As a production consultant, I am frequently asked to produce cost estimates at early stages of design development on a very wide ranging specification which can result in a great deal of time and effort being wasted, not just by the designers but by the estimators at every stage of the production process. Of course that is what estimators are supposed to do but overloading them unduly will just result in delays getting realistic costs to clients on time, which we all know can be very frustrating at times.
Often, the main issue is budget; it is all very well designing for a whole range of print and binding techniques but frequently, what starts out as an all singing, all dancing concept will get diluted by financial, constraints to a much simpler solution.
There is nothing wrong with this of course, sometimes you have to stretch your thinking outside of the usual constraints but for any designer who is trying to be commercially successful this can result in a lot of un-billable time.
To get back to my original observation, when concepts had to be physically drawn by hand with each stage being much more laborious and time consuming, it is amazing how focused you can become. Introducing radical changes of format and style would in effect mean a complete restart and could jeopardise the due deadline for presenting to the end client.
The positive side of course is that with the speed and power of Macintosh OSX, powerful design software and the quality available of even relatively low cost in-house digital printers, design concepts can be so highly finished that the client can see exactly what the end result will look like, making it far easier to get approval and to progress the job.
One serious problem that this ease of design development has created is that end clients have become so used to immediacy that they wrongly assume that the same is true for production times of commercial print runs. It is one thing to work up a design concept and produce a handful of presentation visuals; it is something completely different to translate that into a production run, particularly when the job involves multiple print processes or has complex binding with a lot of hand work.
We are often guilty of being afraid to say no t impossible deadlines because we fear that if we do not agree to those time constraints there are many others out there who will. If we are to achieve high standards must follow through to the quality of the end product, something that can be adversely affected by unrealistic production schedules.
Perhaps colleges should actively encourage designers not to throw away those sketch pads but to use them far more readily to develop the thinking process at the early conceptual stages of design. I am not generating on this as I am sure there are many designers who still prefer to work this way and many colleges who actively encourage this, but it would be far too easy to fall into the trap of using the computer screen and the potential of available design software as a substitute for sound creative thinking.
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