I’ve been a designer for 22 years. Originally (obviously I guess) for print. Now and again the odd web job came along. Then, perhaps a year ago, I suddenly thought… ‘I don’t know when I last booted up QX or ID’. Woah?
A little while later I was doing a design for print again. To my surprise, I found myself immediately using stylesheets in InDesign… I’d hardly ever used them before, except for larger books and documents. But here I was using them for the smallest of publications. I realised that my web work in html and css had caused me to be so much more organised, semantic and concerned about ‘future proofing’ in my work.
Then I began to wonder if, in a very short space of time, the web community of designers and developers, W3C and other bodies had together developed a product that has even more power and flexibility than the print design apps by the heavyweight players QuarkXPress and Adobe?
When I think of what’s achievable with CSS, Pseudo Elements etc etc, I feel that they are beginning to overtake even the most basic functionality of the old school giants. Even now, in Illustrator, I don’t think you can have a box with a different colour and width of border on every side, even in Illustrator. This is a CSS basic!
It made me realise two things: How slow these fat cats can be to listen to the needs of their user community and how rapidly the web is overtaking the print world.
Anyway… just some thoughts on the changes in my industry over the years.
My thanks to Chris and all the contributors to this site for all their helpful input.
Sly.
