Creative Resources
Revolution in Creative Media
by Rick Hendershot,
The Traffic Advisor
It is not news, but in the last 20
years (or even less) we have seen virtually all the applied creative
arts revolutionized by digital technology. Everything from graphic
design to animation to photography to video and audio production has
been shaken to its roots by this revolution. Even the
not-so-purely-graphics (or "media" related) creative arts such as
writing, presenting, training, and, yes, even "sales" have been turned
upside down by one or another aspect of the digital revolution.
Graphic Design came first...
It is probably fair to say that
"desktop publishing" was the first new digital technology to sweep
through an entire industry. This particular phase of the revolution in
creative media took place in the decade between 1985 and 1995, give or
take a year or two on either end of this period.
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In fact desktop publishing software
like Pagemaker, Coreldraw, and Photoshop were (along with the
Spreadsheet and Word Processor) the "killer apps" of the early desktop
computer era. They cemented the place of digital technology not only
in the creative graphic arts, but in the workplace generally. Within a
year or two of the introduction of relatively powerful Mac computers
and Windows 3.1 (in the early 90s) along with stable versions of these
graphics software packages, entire "typesetting" and static camera
departments in printing, publishing, and advertising firms were
gutted. Older equipment costing ten or twenty times as much in many
cases was replaced with much less expensive desktop computers with
more power and much broader capabilities. The old stuff went out on
the sidewalk for the junkman. And in many cases the staff went with
it. Both were replaced by younger, less expensive, more nimble,
ultimately much more capable substitutes.
The
rest of the creative arts have followed
Each of these major software packages (Pagemaker,
Quarkxpress, Coreldraw, Illustrator, Photoshop) had a major impact on
the major application groups in various creative fields. The
groundwork had been laid. What seemed like relatively simple page
layout, illustration, and image manipulation spread to encompass
imaging (printing with digital devices), animation (working with
multiple sets of images and illustrations), audio/video compositing
(working with full blown time-line productions, special effects, and
multi-layer, multi-track audio productions), and much more. Entire
industries were again sucked into the vortex of digitization:
television production, news reporting, cellular phone technology,
architecture, product design, full length feature film production,
cable TV distribution, audio recording production. Nothing even
remotely related to the "creative arts" has been left untouched.
Even photographers have slowly come
around. Until recently it was only large commercial photo studios that
had made the shift, because the financial incentives simply did not
exist for the small studio. But this too has changed. Now online image
processing has finally come of age. A one or two-man wedding
photography operation can take five or six hundred images on Saturday,
sort them over the next few days, upload the 200 best ones to the
processing lab (somewhere in cyber-land), and simply offload the
customer "interfacing" and final order processing to the lab people.
And we can be fairly confident that
this revolution is not yet over.
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Rick Hendershot publishes lots of
stuff, including Trade Show Tips, The Traffic Advisor,
www.sbo-linknet.com,
www.america-banners.com,
www.internetgolfreview.com...
the list goes on.
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