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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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