I knew that stepping into my current teaching position came tied directly to overseeing the maintenance and support of two Mac labs but I definitely hadn’t fully assessed how much more technical knowledge was going to come with it. As of the current moment, I’m finding out more about system color calibration and color profiles than I’d ever banked on!

Probably the two key changes that have opened the floodgates on learning new and often confounding technical information have been:

1. I’m now dealing with about 28 Macs that are connected to a predominately PC network servicing a slew of other systems / users.

2. I’m also now dealing with a color calibrated environment that’s working its way to the level of a small service bureau / prepress shop.

Before this turns into a completely tech-based post, however, I’m finding that there’s a bigger bubble being burst by this knowledge: the myth of desktop publishing. We’ve heard it bantered around for several years now, and we’ve also personally experienced the joys and frustrations of being able to do what typesetting services, paste-up artists, and service bureaus managed for designers well before most of us came onto the scene.

I’ve listened to many, many practitioners talk about the challenges of sending specifications off to one of many service providers only to get their comps / mock-ups back and have to spend several more hours slicing rubdown type apart or shuffling photostat pieces to get the layout into the proper final format. I was among the last few students in my undergraduate education who actually had the chance to work with a bit of rubdown type and cut a few amberliths just for the experience of it.

All of this made me relish the ease with which we were able to scoot type around, set up complicated layouts, color-correct photography, and then more or less send the file across the network to generate a color output of it. I still relish that, though I become ever more and more aware of just how complex, intricate, and often fraught the technological route between the computer terminal and the final output device actually is.

What really bursts desktop publishing for me is the growing awareness of how exponentially the technology changes and how much deeper the complexity of the technology continues to become. As several colleagues and I looked through thick user guides for the Adobe CS2 to discover how to synchronize the color settings / presets throughout Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop a quiet voice in the back of my brain began to wonder whether all of this personal prep work is worth the time invested in it OR whether it’s simply time to admit that it’s not economic to continue to pretend we have a prepress shop / service bureau right there at our fingertips and finally let an expert in that area work their magic. (The real challenge with this is frankly judging how much “assistance” you can actually afford - almost all of the companies that have the answers we seem to need know that they need to charge for that information and are doing so liberally)

I suppose I’m wondering if anyone else among the ranks is finally feeling worn out by the multiplying digital complexities of maintaining a Mac, servicing multiple applications installed on it, navigating the labyrinth of features within those applications, and attempting to get them all to cooperate to generate the layout that we’re really expecting once it hits press. I know many of us are at least minor techheads about what we do, but I continue to wonder how much I really desire to be a computer technician / programmer AND a graphic designer.

I hear so many long-term practitioners lamenting the numbing and dumbing of graphic ideas that the comptuer has brought in tow with it, and continue to hear the call of brushes, pencils, pens, and Exacto blades coming from my supply closets. Did I sign up to become a computer jockey who would spend his waking hours determining which prepress standards CS2 should be oriented to, only to watch new rounds of print-outs frustratingly color-shifted by the “proper” color settings? OR, did I sign up for the joy of making images?

How long will we continue to be “Graphic Designers” who everyone expects to be Mac technicians and when will we become graphic designers again in the sense of those who are expected to generate evocative imagery, cogent visual ideas, and juggle type and image to generate communication?