Role of Designers
Over the past decade, I have donned many hats professionally. One of them happens to be working closely with designers. People with special skills, they can create magic from a plain digital canvas. They are artists who give life to ideas, people and brands.
Over the years, the role of a designer has gone through a sea change:
The real artists: early 70s – 90s – They were painters and artists working without any technological intervention. These were people who would hand paint a large film poster. It would take days, if not weeks to produce one.
The DTP operators: early 90s – early 2000s. Early days of software giants like Adobe and Coreldraw, that were launched as pure play publishing and layouting softwares. These people would typically ‘design’ pages of a book.
the designers: early 2000s. These were people who used to be employed at publication houses that owned a magazine or even a newspaper. They had access to apple hardware and software. They made every magazine and newspaper look glamorous.
The agency’s little army: Years 2000 – 2010. As early as the first dot-com boom and subsequently the bubble, a lot of young people with a creative mind ventured into working with brands and helped them with their marketing messaging. Tools continued to be at their disposal. Given limited access to these tools, such talent was restricted to network agencies, like JWT, Ogilvy and their contemporaries.
The pious freelancer: 2010 to 2015. He or she took instructions from their clients to create a brochure, a presentation or a newsletter. they delivered and met expectations. most of them working on unlicensed software.
Social Creators: 2015 onwards. When Facebook went berserk, a new era dawned among young professionals and one-man agencies. they took to social media like a fish took to water. they had all the tools to create and design messages for various platforms. The video was just an experiment.
Content creators: 2015 onwards. Around the same time, softwares like canva gave even non-creative people an edge by giving them DIY tools to create and design whatever they wanted to share on social media. This led to a boom in personal branding. Designer or not, we had something we could create all by ourselves.
the futurists. the pandemic in 2020…and beyond. The pandemic made life even more interesting for this community. They went mainstream. They were seen as equals among gods. Art and science came together. A designer now calls the shots alongside her engineering peer. Their role? Solving real world problems using design.