This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Attribution: Willi Heidelbach
The Changing Graphic Design World
It seems almost every day there is some technology change that is affecting my business. For quite a few years now I have been watching the end of what I call the sticky, gooey, drippy part of the graphic arts industry. Any part of design that was liquid or involved solvents has gone away, starting with typesetting, then printing color separations and plates, then photography with all its chemicals and now actual printing. Everything is becoming digital and web based.
If you were into using computers this has been fun to be part of, if you owned a business based on fluids it has been a struggle. What is happening now, well since the Great Recession it has been the accelerated ending of actual printing and printed material. People still print, but so much of printed communication as moved to the web. Advertising is being replaced with social media; mailings are replaced with email blasts, video is just growing and growing.
What I Have Been Doing
On my side over the last several years it has been a process of reinvention and constant learning. I have been adding many new services and abilities to my portfolio. Services like video, and social media-consulting on and doing, web design, learning lots of new online platforms for myself and my clients. Working with platforms such as Linkedin, Facebook, Google+, blogs, Picasa, and YouTube.
Where is This Going
Where is this going, it is going all on line and moving from outside services to ourselves. I tell people that we still need to do the same stuff, market our business. But instead of using all kinds of outside services such as trade advertising, mailings and the yellow pages, services that we just kind of paid and sent stuff off to we now have to do these things ourselves. I look at it as dollars and time, we use to spend X amount of dollars with outside vendors to get Y amount of promotion, now we convert those dollars into time, and pull the effort in house. The services and marketing cost the same but aren’t there any more, now we have to do it. And we have to learn these services and manage the marketing ourselves. With it all kind of based around the online world and changing
