Designers Need Time For Creativity

Yesterday I received an email that pushed me right over the edge. It was a request for help in creating a website and included the line “I know it’s easy, but I just don’t have the time to learn how to do it”. Well, does learning how to play the piano make you a concert pianist? It’s the person playing the piano—not the piano—that makes the music great and the playing of  it seem easy. It is also the same way with a designer and the designer’s computer system. 

I guess I’m partly to blame for this all-to-common misunderstanding of the computers role in advertising. Twenty years ago we were working with T-squares and triangles on drawing boards, spec’ing type and doing other creative jobs by hand. When we first heard about the computer we thought it would give us more time to be creative so we all wanted one. In order to get a computer we had to first convince our boss to shell out the big bucks. We eagerly explained to him how a computer would make our work easier and in turn we could work faster and save the company money. This pleased the boss and he bought us computers.

Soon every designer had a computer. The boss, seeing that we also had a keyboard, handed over the job of the professionally trained typesetter to us, plus many copywriting and proofreading assignments. Wow, this computer really was saving the company money—they no longer needed typesetters or proofreaders. Both the boss and his boss were pleased.

The computer could also handle production work so the production department was the next to go. Designers had to learn technical production skills and shoulder the additional responsibilities of an entire department. Crunch-time changes? No problem, designers could do this too. With our speedy computers, we could also handle more work—our workload increased and turnaround times were shortened. All these improvements in productivity pleased upper management.

Today, ineffective advertising is everywhere, much of it created by secretaries and students who know the software programs and are cheap labor. What are the designers doing? Typesetting, copywriting, proofreading, retouching photos, production and most of all—still wishing they had more time to be creative.