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"I think most of your woes can be attributed to the e-globalization of the workforce."
It's not really that. I'd say foreign workers have probably the LEAST impact of all to the graphic design industry. Here's what happened between 2005 and 2010, in no particular order:
1) Everyone and their brother bought an iPod or iPhone or iMac
^^^ This led everyone to believe, quite overnight, that they KNEW what made "good" design. Nevermind the fact that Apple churns out stale, sterile, lifeless, Helvetica-like, plain, boring designs over and over (Apple does good stuff, sure, but they are not the pinnacle of design) -- this popularization of a brand held as a sacred cow in design led the "normals" to think they could do design as good as the professionals.
2) Adobe kinda screwed professionals over
^^^ In their desperate attempt to steal the publishing business from Quark, which had a 95% marketshare from the 90s until 2004 or so, Adobe came out with the Creative Suite. Now, they had design collections before, but never this cheap. For about $500-600 you could now get Photoshop, Illustrator AND InDesign, whereas QuarkExpress 4, IIRC, started at $599. What this did was suddenly let smaller companies and individuals who never considered design software before have the top 3 or 4 major design programs for a fraction of what it used to be.
3) After 2000, you didn't need a Mac to do design
^^^ Up until Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 I believe, you had to deal with all sorts of issues in converting files, having different fonts (PCs did't really like Mac Postscript fonts) and even Photoshop/Illustrator/etc. versions of the same # didn't always have parity feature/support-wise. But 2000 or so onward, Adobe's programs played nice with each other, and if you didn't need Quark (let's say InDesign was good) and you had your fonts you needed as TTF or OpenType, PCs were perfectly fine. Even now, no one NEEDS a Mac for design. That's a lie.
4) Direct Mail died
^^^ Direct mail companies employed TONS of designers. Sure, it was low-rung, not-glamorous work, but it employed tons of designs all over the country. When people stopped getting mailboxes full of stuff, these companies went away, taking design jobs.
5) Phone books died
^^^ Phone directory advertising, production and printing was a huuuuuuuuuge business. And for many professions -- like plumbing and HVAC and lawyers -- it still is as valuable now as it was then. But before everyone was online 24/7 in the mid-00s onward (when broadband internet hit the majority of households across the US), the local phone book was the key info hub. And these books were created at a local or regional level, and these suckers were hundreds if not thousands of pages every year.
6) Catalogs and weekly salespapers died
^^^ Remember JCP and Sears' Christmas catalogs? What about their catalogs in the Spring/Summer? What about all those random mail order companies that had catalogs? What about salespapers? Those things were sometimes dozens of pages long, and varied all across the country. Tons of designers employed by companies that did those.
7) Newspapers have mostly died or just shrunk in size+printing intervals
^^^ Remember how thick the Sunday paper was? Remember how there used to be a daily paper in nearly every town printed at LEAST 3-5 times each week? Remember how these used local designers for production of the paper and design of local ads? This was decimated over the last decade especially. Thank Craigslist, mostly because most newspaper $ was generated by Classifieds.
8) Magazines have mostly died or just shrunk in size+printing intervals
^^^ Same as newspapers, but even worse. Remember when Computer Shopper was about 1.5-2" thick for like $5/issue? Remember when EGM and GamePro were 400+ pages each? Remember when magazines that wanted to stand out were large format? Remember how good the inside of Rolling Stone smelled, especially when they had cologne/perfume samples? Remember how gigantic those bridal magazines used to be? Remember in Borders and B&N, even up until the mid 00s, when they had probably 100' or more of magazines on 4-5 shelves and how dozens of people would be looking at them/buying them? Remember getting those direct mail magazine order forms, where you'd check the box and sign up for multiple subscriptions at a huge discount? Well guess what. Everyone 2010 onward especially only wants Twitter news and stuff from Kotaku, Huffington Post, NYT, Reddit and WaPo to name a few. Magazines struggled a bit in the early 00s, but social media and a few outlets controlling the narrative and doing TERRIBLE work outside of reporting news stories (anyone with two braincells knows journalism and proper writing/research/fact-checking in stuff now is garbage compared to what it was. Perhaps magazines (outside of niche or B2B) can't exist nowadays if website usage is wide spread, but it's very clear now that READERS (consumers) are cheapskates and will not pay or wait for good content. They just want instant news for free with adblock on and can't possibly wait even a week or two for a proper, more balanced analysis of anything. And magazines employed tons of designers.
9) Web design is all but dead
^^^ It's all Themeforest $15 themes and companies only want the cheapest of the cheap WordPress site w/ specific pre-made plugins and a Facebook and Twitter page too. You can barely convince companies to even spend a little bit of money on proper corporate branding. All they want is SEO and to look like every other boring site.
10) Identity systems? Psssshhh...
^^^ What company even cares about a proper identity system now? How many companies or individual business owners would even spend $100 or more on a proper logo that is researched and tailored to their business and corporate vision? Sure, some ad agencies with big clients like zoos, hospitals, etc. can still get expensive identity work, but everyone else? Odds are, the business owner will either make the logo themselves or their nephew will do it.
And don't even bring up stationery/letterhead/business card/etc. design, which would all tie in, because...
11) Local printers are dead.
^^^ Thanks Overnightprints and VistaPrint for this. You might find a few stragglers at a local business level like small 1-2 color t-shirt shops and sign companies -- both of which can't be made/done all that much cheaper with online resources (no on online is gonna install your 10' long sign on your storefront). But lots and lots of small printers existed for decades that would serve the local businesses with copying, printing and trimming demands. No more. These places are all but gone. Why pay Bob the local printer and his designer $50 for 200 business cards when OvernightPrints can accept your low-res RGB JPG and give you 500 cards for $10, as long their logo is on the back?
12) Internally, companies don't respect designers anymore.
^^^ Maybe they never did, and just resented having to pay an artist a good wage to make a print ad when the guy on the loading docks is covered in sweat and has back issues as he earns his paycheck. But I think when all these previous things started happening, company owners and VPs and bean counters made a mad dash to get rid of designers ASAP. So don't hire that web designer...just get someone off Craigslist to make you a WordPress site that you can use the cool theme you found. Don't hire a designer to make company brochures and flyers and pamphlets for employees -- just get Wanda the receptionist Creative Suite.
13) Colleges flooded the market w/ design grads
^^^ Look, to train a nurse, it takes a lot of work. Most importantly, you gotta have fairly smart and decently skilled students to properly pass all nursing courses and then the required industry certifications. Guess what? With Design-related programs, everything is subjective. And there's no industry certification to anything, so a guy who sucks at Photoshop and a trained designer is equal in many employers' eyes as long as they can apply the radial blue filter to make that cool effect the owner likes. As a result, colleges all over churn out hundreds and hundreds of design grads on a state-wide basis every year, and most of these kids have a terrible grasp on typography and basic branding and visual communication work.
14) The Great Recession killed any chance of previous print/web designers transitioning to something else
^^^ Because barely anyone was hiring designers, and often downsizing/outsourcing design work, suddenly all the designers who worked in the 90s-00s had nowhere to go. They didn't even have a chance to finally move into management or even a more generic Marketing dept worker (or manager) role.
They were simply axed. And they were axed at a time when all industries were affected so not even a new MBA could help.
15) Design isn't really design anymore
The few places that do print design work mostly have designers in catch-all/hybrid Marketing roles, where they spend just as much time dealing with the clients or making proposals or doing overall marketing work and basically doing Production Manager work rather than straight design work. And web designers? Sheesh. For starters, "Web Designer" is a bad title, just because nerds in the Bay area are constantly sniffing their own farts. They are now "UI Designers"...but take a look at most job openings -- they want "UX Designers"...which is just a different way of saying, "No design...you just worry about Google Adwords and pick the simplest/cheapest WordPress themes and plugins to use." Even sneakier, many UX roles want the person do lots of HTML5 work, which is basically JavaScript work, and heavy CSS work as well...far more than any Web Designer ever had to do in the past. Basically, they want a front-end developer who can manage Google click-thru campaigns.
I'm sure I've missed other reasons, but the sad reality is, a perfect storm of industry killing things happened in about 10-15 years, from software/hardware companies screwing over designers...to the colleges...to the lack of industry certification to block phonies (what a waste AIGA is)...to cheapskate/lazy consumers opting for web everything over spending anything locally...to employers killing art departments and thinking Wanda the secretary and her copy of Photoshop being as good as a trained designers.
The industry is a complete cesspool now, and I have zero sympathy for anyone who has entered into it in the past decade or more recently. You're gonna be 30-40 and switching careers out of desperation -- GUARANTEED.
-- End of comment
