Category: Graphic Design

Once, long ago, I received a manuscript for a book I was formatting. The author/editor had used Track Changes in MS Word, without, at the end, “accepting” all the changes. So I formatted the book, which ran rather long, not with the manuscript, but with every iteration of the manuscript imported into the page-assembly file.

They should have known better, but they were oblivious to the automatic feature, and like so many people, did not properly understand how the tools they were using worked.

Today I learned that the default behaviour of some applications, TextEdit for example, is to autosave any changes you make, but keep EVERY version of your files in a Revert To menu. “A Modern MacOS just keeps the changes by default,” These kinds of paternalistic hand-holding features are a trap for people who are begging to have a version-control nightmare. You need to manage your versions of files consciously and actively.

When editorial got a look at that first-pass I had formatted they spit out their drink. But I had formatted the manuscript file I was given. The formatter cannot be editing the supplied manuscript. So, they had to resupply the Word file WITHOUT every version embedded in it, and they paid me to format the whole book… again.

“Been reading some forum stuff about designers ‘taking input’ from non designers and the majority is, “that’s how things work in an office. Suck it up and collect your paycheck or find another job.”

We don’t do this to other qualified professionals. We don’t do it with electricians or cooks. The only reason this can happen in graphic design studios is because nothing gets broken and no one dies when it happens. No one would think, “ok,” that soccer mom is gonna be under the hoist ‘sharing’ with the mechanic who is diagnosing their car problems, or that hospital admin is gonna be in the room ‘collaborating’ with the surgeon.

These are non-designers ‘playing’ at being designers by exploiting the technical skills of an actual designer to facilitate their affectation. This is why a lot of studios use, and get better work from freelancers. You give a professional their assignment and let the professional do their job. This micromanaging interference with all its pop psychology rhetoric and team-speak bullshit is unprofessionalism wearing a pretty dress.

And what can happen when a studio or art department is run this way is that everything takes longer and is terribly frustrating. And good creative people leave. And dull, unimaginative robots stay. And that affects the work.

And it is not ‘different’ because it is ‘creative.’ Indeed, good creative actually depends on people being free to work creatively. Imagine Picasso working if a committee of his art buyers sent a delegate to his studio to day-to-day ‘collaborate’ with the artist to ‘help’ him to produce more marketable stuff…

This is in some very real sense a garbage-in micromanagement style. One I was very familiar with in the early ’90s. It is not a productive model. The only thing it serves is the ego of the people playing at being ‘creatives.’ And this structure to some extent guarantees garbage-out.

What you read on forums illustrates this beautifully. Does “that’s how things work in an office. Suck it up and collect your paycheck or find another job,” sound like a creative, productive workplace to you?

Wikipedia says, “A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. This includes at least three sentences. The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented. At various times, the beginning of a paragraph has been indicated by the pilcrow: ¶.”

In applications like InDesign, a paragraph is any discrete block of text that needs to be separated from those around it. Paragraphs as defined are an example. So are all heads of various levels, and list entries. Publishing software is set up with the assumption that these will end with a pilcrow, the paragraph return, and that paragraph returns will appear nowhere else. Otherwise, basic functionality such as style sheets cannot work correctly.

There are three common ways in which you might find paragraph returns misused:

1. To position text.
2. To create paragraph space, or
3. To break lines within a paragraph.

All three of these usages present more or less the same problems. Because returns are not uniform in size, using them to position text or create relationships between blocks of text or other elements is imprecise and difficult to duplicate. Working this way, elements that appear throughout a document will be inconsistent because every instance is a kludge. Space above and below paragraphs must be created within the style sheet using the space above and space below properties. The position of a block of text should be achieved using the text-box alignment properties or by appropriately sizing and positioning the text box.

Creating line breaks with returns is an even more problematic misuse of paragraph returns. Inserting a paragraph-ending return within a paragraph creates two paragraphs. So, the second paragraph must have its style changed to make it appear to be part of the paragraph above. There is a forced line break character intended for this purpose. However, if you are manually breaking hundreds of lines in a document instead of, for example, unchecking the Hyphenate box in the style sheet once, what are you doing?

If you use returns in any of these ways, you create a document that is much harder to work with. Design changes that apply to elements spaced or positioned with returns require that you revisit and redo every instance instead of making one change to a style sheet. Text edits that cause kludged paragraphs to reflow can produce typographic messes that add hours to production time.

There is another drawback to using empty returns in a document. Every one of those returns has paragraph attributes of its own, including style, size and font. While these varying attributes make the returns problematic as formatting elements, they also introduce fonts and styles that may not appear anywhere else in the job, confusing the document’s design and output. Jobs or portions of them routinely get picked up from other jobs. If the picked-up content is not reconciled with the current design, you will soon end up with a job full of extra fonts and styles. Empty returns are a place for such problems to hide.

You find yourself about to cross a bridge. The bridge spans a deep canyon. A sign on the approach to the bridge informs you that the architect was as little concerned with, engineering as a great many designers are with sound document creation . . . Will you cross the bridge? It looks like a bridge, after all. But what will happen if the architect felt that precise dimensions were not his responsibility? The bridge ends might not meet in the middle. For that matter, what if the architect was not all that interested in materials and figured that cardboard and hemp would do just as well as, say, reinforced concrete and structural steel? It indeed looks very like a bridge – a beautiful, arching, graceful bridge, in a very interesting colour. It is, however, starting to rain and the cardboard looks to be getting wet.

When I started working about twenty years ago, the technology that is used in graphic design studios today was in its infancy. This technology changed almost every aspect of workflow, which became as unlike that of a pre-computer studio as it could be. This presented problems.

The technical experience and customary working process of many senior people who had been in traditional studios for decades became irrelevant. Their aesthetic skills may have been intact, but they no longer understood how their concept would or could be realized. The stat-camera they were so familiar with was gone. There were no rough paste-ups, galleys, marker renderings or comped type. They did not have the skills or working vocabulary to do or to direct computer work, so their ability to interact with projects was significantly compromised. They could jump on the learning curve, and many did. However, many more blundered ahead and produced work that required extensive alteration and correction to be useful.

Junior designers, entering the field with computer skills, were often saddled with this task, pigeonholed in a way that was very difficult to escape. Juniors who a decade before would have been mentored by more experienced designers found themselves explaining why the direction they were being given was inappropriate. They found themselves instructing the very people they should have been learning their trade from. How could resentment not arise from such a situation?

Where once there was a ladder of junior, intermediate and senior designers, everyone ascending according to talents and ambition, there appeared a two-class system of creative and technical people. The former were seemingly above technical considerations in their stratosphere of ideas, and the latter were not taken seriously for their creative abilities because, by definition, anyone who had technical skills could not be creative. This is where my bridge metaphor comes from. It was like choosing an architect with no technical appreciation over one with extensive engineering skill precisely because the former didn’t know what he was doing.

Add to this that many people entered “desktop publishing” with no design skill set whatever. Companies that decided the operation of a machine was a menial task would grab a handful of their clerical staff and send them on a ten-week course to become desktop publishers. These people were particularly ineffective at dragging studios into the 21st century. Senior designers who lacked the technical vocabulary to do or direct computerized design were directing DTPs who may themselves have understood the basics of operating Quark XPress, but lacked the design skills to understand what they were being directed to do.

In these circumstances, what passed for design or art direction usually resolved a minimum of the design requirements. And what happened in production amounted to what carpenters call back-framing: trying to make a comprehensive design based on the existing pseudo-design. Since the artists doing this were either junior designers or not designers at all, and since neither was benefiting from effective guidance, the quality of their work largely depended on what they could figure out for themselves.

This situation produced a lot of problematic work. For years, much of what film houses and printers did was to correct and adjust artwork in client files just to make it possible to RIP the jobs.

Computerization revolutionized graphic design, and revolutions are messy. And yet, a messy transition period between an old order and a new should come to a conclusion. Two decades later, some of the most fundamentally awful design and production documents I have ever worked with were recent. Why?

There has never been a “clean start” since the introduction of computerized design and production. Designers drag along work practices and bad habits acquired years ago. They have all evolved their own standards, giving rise to the notion, excusing inconsistency, that “everyone has their own way of doing things.” No surprise, then, when it is difficult to prescribe sound work practices or distinguish bad ones. And yet we should.

When we do not produce sound comprehensive designs and documents that are easy to work with, there is a toll in time, money and peace of mind. No one wants to be the architect of little disasters, and we can do better.