So here we are in the first month of 2009 and all the bad news just gets worse. In this bizarre economic climate, we’re all adapting to new ways of working… and not all of them good for design.
Ten years ago, there were a few freelancing sites out there and when you went to one, most of the subscribers were local, or at least from your within your own country. Now, they’re from all over the world. The bidding climate has changed from competitive to viscous. When you bid on a job that is reasonable and fair, you can bet your grandmother’s life insurance someone will underbid you to the point where its not worth bidding at all. They’re bidding just to get the job at any (or no) cost.
The way I see it for designers, is the quality of design will go down… way down. We’re entering the Design Dark Ages. Companies and design firms are cutting back, way back.They’re hiring younger people with little or no experience and cutting out the guys and gals with years of accumulated experience. The experience is what makes a designer good, having worked with lots of other designers and clients. But that experience costs money to staff, more than say a kid fresh out of art school. A senior level art director is more expensive than Joe Common who started with a summer job at a firm and was then handed a full-time design position. At the same time, the firm will only get designs that come out of Joe’s inexperienced head and not from Frank-Been-Doing-This-A-Long-Time who can design circles around Joe. It used to be that it was the experience we were all trying to collect working in a design firm, but it seems that its almost dangerous to have now.
Seen from another angle, with the economy taking a face plant into the proverbial toilet, its causing designers to looking for escape routes out of the design field altogether. Good designers are turning to accounting jobs and retail, and let’s not forget those that made the leap to real estate (my condolences).
Every time there is an economic boot to the head, advertising dollars are the first to go. Advertising for businesses are luxury dollars they don’t have these days. Firms began to add more services for their clients in a bid (to keep their clients and) to help them generate new revenue and create new revenue streams for themselves. That alone raised their overheads. So they cut back on personnel, cutting the bigger fish first. The work that was done by three people is now being done by one and chances are, he’s younger than my shoes.
Experience is a good thing but if you have lots of it, you probably haven’t noticed the targeting laser on the back of your head. Good design is out there, don’t get me wrong. There’s just less and less of us doing it.
Tags: advertising, art direction, design, good design
