6 posts tagged with “design history”

It’s been said that desktop publishing democratized graphic design. For those of you too young to know what the term means, it means the technology that enabled graphic design to go digital. It was an ecosystem, really: the Mac, PostScript, LaserWriter, and PageMaker. But before all that, designers depended on typesetters to set type.

David Langton writing for UX Collective:

A lot was lost when the Macintosh wiped out the traditional typesetting industry. From the art of typography to the craft of typesetting, many essential elements were lost. Typesetters were part of a tradition that stretched back more than 500 years to Gutenberg’s printing press. They understood the basics of type: kerning (spacing between the letters), leading (the space between lines of text), and line breaks (how to avoid widows — those solo words abandoned at the end of a paragraph). They knew about readability (like how to avoid setting type that was too wide to read). There were classic yet limited fonts, with standards for size and leading that assured that everyone working within common ranges maintained a threshold for quality. Yet it was in the craft or business side of typesetting that these services were most under appreciated. Typesetters provided overnight service. They worked overnight, so graphic designers did not have to. We would finish our days specifying the type, and the typesetters would keystroke the manuscripts, proofread, stylize the type, and set up columns following our instructions.

Designers would then pick up the galleys from the typesetters in the morning. The black type was photographically printed on white photo paper. You’d have to cut them up and paste them onto boards, assembling your layout.

Because this was such a physical process, we had to slow down. Langton says:

But since the Macintosh became an in-house tool, the process was reversed. Now, designers design first, then think about it. This shift in process has contributed to a trivialization of the role of graphic designer because anyone can noodle around with the Mac’s sophisticated type tools and make layouts. The design process has been trivialized while the thinking, the evaluation, and the strategic part of the process are often abandoned.

One small thing I’ll point out is that desktop publishing wasn't popularized until 1985.

• PostScript was released by Adobe in 1984.
• The LaserWriter printer was released by Apple in 1985.
• PageMaker was released by Aldus—later bought by Adobe—in 1985.

I have relayed here before the story that I’ve been using Macs since 1985. It wasn’t the hardware that drew me in—it was MacPaint. I was always an artistic kid so being able to paint on a digital canvas seemed thrilling to me. And of course it was back then.

Behind MacPaint, was a man named Bill Atkinson. Atkinson died last Thursday, June 5 of pancreatic cancer. In a short remembrance, John Gruber said:

I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he’s on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

I‘m happy that Figma also remembered Atkinson and that they are standing on his shoulders.

Every day at Figma, we wrestle with the same challenges Atkinson faced: How do you make powerful tools feel effortless? How do you hide complexity behind intuitive interactions? His fingerprints are on every pixel we push, every selection we make, every moment of creative flow our users experience.

Apologies for linking to a lot of Christopher Butler recently, but I really love his thinking about design. This time, Butler reminds us about the importance of structure and how the proto-graphic designers we studied in art history, like Piet Mondrian, mastered it.

A well-composed photograph communicates something essential even before we register its subject. A thoughtfully designed page layout feels right before we read a single word. There’s something happening in that first moment of perception that transcends the individual elements being composed.

My favorite passage in his essay begins here:

Perhaps we “read” composition the way we read text — our brains processing visual structure as a kind of fundamental grammar that exists beneath conscious recognition. Just as we don’t typically think about parsing sentences into subjects and predicates while reading, we don’t consciously deconstruct the golden ratio or rule of thirds while looking at an image. Yet in both cases, our minds are translating structure into meaning.

The next eight short paragraphs build on this idea and crescendo with this banger:

In recognizing composition as this fundamental visual language, we begin to understand why good design works at such a deep level. It’s not just about making things look nice — it’s about speaking fluently in a language that predates words, tapping into patterns of perception that feel as natural as breathing.

Composition is a fundamental visual language. I had never thought of it that way and yet it feels right.

The whole thing is great. Please go read it.

A lot of young designers love to look at what’s contemporary, what’s trending on Dribbble or Instagram. But I think to look forward, we must always study our past. I spent the week in New York City, on vacation. My wife and I attended a bunch of Broadway shows and went to the Museum of Broadway, where I became enamored with a lot of the poster art. (’Natch.) I may write about that soon.

Coincidentally, Matthew Strom wrote about the history of album art, featuring the first album cover ever, which uses a photo of the Broadway theater, the Imperial, where I saw Smash earlier this week.

Jay Hoffman, from his excellent The History of the Web site:

1995 is a fascinating year. It’s one of the most turbulent in modern history. 1995 was the web’s single most important inflection point. A fact that becomes most apparent by simply looking at the numbers. At the end of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. 12 months later, there were almost 75,000. By the end of 1995, over 700 new servers were being added to the web every single day.

That was surely a crazy time…

As a longtime Apple fanboy, it's a little hard for me to appreciate the visual design of Windows—Microsoft is a nemesis, if you will. But I will tip my hat to the design practitioners there who've made the company finally pay attention to design.

Side note, reminds me of a story about what Steve Jobs once told me when I was designing the welcome animation for Mac OS X.