Using my face as the star in the Chilean flag, I've here built a profile image for some of my social networking to show solidarity with my Chilean heritage.
I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about how the tools available for visual communications make it easy for just about anybody to design their own (brochure, magazine, business card, website, fill in the blank …).
While it is true that there are more tools available to create professional designs, I truly disagree with the sentiment that anybody can create visual communications (which is, by the way, the ideology behind the Enfineitz Manifesto).
While the tools advance with technological innovations, every generation of enhancement expands the wild frontiers on the outer limits of experimentation. The sentiment that anybody can design is more of a reflection of what mainstream culture embraces. A lot of trends and techniques were pioneered by a brave few who were far ahead of the majority of the population. And those frontiers will always exist. They just keep moving.
When the tools become more accessible, the novelty of gimmicky tricks go through a typical cycle and eventually become mediocre. With any innovation, there is always a frontier. The pioneers will thrive on that edge, taking those tools to their limits.
It is also common to believe that the better the tools to create media, the less skill and talent is needed. This will never be true. I once worked with a magazine editor who believed that if he bought the most state-of-the-art automated camera, he’d be able to publish professional journalistic photos in his magazine just by clicking the shutter. Of course, few had the courage to tell him the photos he submitted to the art director (me) were garbage. Tools afford advanced functions, but never replace talent and critical, analytical thinking.
If you rewind several decades and centuries, you can observe that innovative tools for creating media were accessible to the common person, yet it didn’t reduce the quality and rarity of masterpieces. Any famous author, Mark Twain, perhaps, could have lamented that now that paper and pen were available to just about any commoner, his work would be devalued. Any famous musician at the dawn of rock and roll could likewise lament that the availability of guitars and drums, and the simple skill of singing, made it possible for anyone to produce records. I’m sure that Bono and his friends of U2 did not see that as an obstacle when they started writing and performing their music. The same analogy could be applied to the filmmaker.
Some have said that WordPress is threatening web design because of the same accessibility. I am not threatened. Yes, WordPress is an amazing tool, and gets a lot of menial coding out of the way so that true creative media can be published. But it doesn’t mean that everyone is automatically a great web designer because they can “click-n-build” a brand new site. WordPress is rather a tool on which to build truly outstanding media. But only a minority of the population will take it to its frontier, where there exists nothing but a blank slate and a wilderness of possibility. Maybe I’ll see you out there …