In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new type of software caught the public attention: Desktop Publishing (DTP). Everyone wanted to learn how to use this new tool to make better looking paperwork. Resumés got fancy (along with new styles of paper). Group newsletters got multi-column layouts. Everyone was thrilled that they could make their work look pretty and expensive.
Everyone except graphic designers.
The untrained masses assumed that they had been given the secret keys to graphic design. Everyone and their sister was calling themselves a graphic designer because they had PageMaker and a laser printer (or worse, MS Word and an inkjet).
I worked with many graphic designers through much of this time. I saw their frustration at their training and talent being degraded, devalued by people who assumed their title without really understand the fundamentals.
Just because Microsoft Word had added the ability to use columns on a page, and you knew where the button was to start that, did not mean that you knew about ligatures, kerning, widows & orphans, etc. Don’t even get me started on colour trapping and bleeding or CMYK vs RGB.
You didn’t suddenly become a savant on fonts (even as cheap fonts became available by the thousands). Hierarchies, compatibility, readability, and even licensing rights weren’t topics you’d learned about.
It was a bit of a wild west, with the professional graphic designers just trying to protect their reputations and client base while the amateurs ran wild.
For those of you too young to remember, this is the era that spawned all the Papyrus and Comic Sans memes.
It probably took a decade for the workforce to realize that access to tools did not equate to ability. Theory existed for a reason. Talent and honed instinct (aka innate creativity) mattered.
I do believe this is a good analogy for the current state of generative AI.
Anyone can sit at their home computer, log into Claude or ChatGPT and pretend they’re a professional writer or content creator.
And you know, at the amateur level, it’s fun to watch, possibly fun to play with (I don’t use GenAI for ethical reasons, but I’m sure I’ll be hearing about it second-hand, as my wife is obsessed with learning it). But the second you start deluding yourself that the existence of a tool makes you a natural, you’re crossing a line. Writers and other creatives are now in the same battle that graphic designers fought over desktop publishing.
I wonder what lessons they could teach us on how to survive.