Graphic design = a dead field

Before the idiots at Indeed a/k/a Indeediots killed the forum, I saved all the design-related threads in a folder and have been trying to find the time to transfer them here (they aren’t available on the Wayback Machine). Hopefully I’ll get to that over the next few months. In the meantime, I’ve pulled out one specific comment by frequent poster RandomEmployee (no, that’s not me, and if they’re reading this I hope they don’t take offense at my republishing their comment without their permission, lol) who left the following comment in the "Graphic Design: A Dead Field" thread which really nails what the hell happened to this field (comment was in response to a previous comment, at the top in italics).

_____________________

"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

Our useless "job centres"

I recently re-watched “The Full Monty,” which I saw when it came out back in 1997. At the center of these men’s lives was the British version of our local Division of Labor and Training office. Theirs was simply referred to as the “jobclub.” In Stinkassachusetts, it’s called The One Stop Career Center. In Rhode Island, it’s called netWORKri. Watching this movie reminded me of the horrible experience I had here in the US with these dismal and useless entities.

Stinkassachusetts, Part 1

I visited the Norwood location in July 2013. At this point, I had accumulated about 500 rejections over the previous nine months, so panic was definitely starting to set in. The only "assistance" they had to offer was a bunch of workshops that were booked for weeks. The only one that had an opening was the one on writing cover letters, so I signed up for it. I figured that even if I don’t learn anything new here it might be good to get out of the house and maybe meet some people.

The “instructor” spent the majority of the workshop showing us how to properly apply for a job advertised in the newspaper. I am not fucking kidding here. He also exhibited a great deal of cluelessness; for example, after spending a majority of the class discussing newspaper ads and mailing printed letters, he finally got around to discussing responding to job ads via email. According to him, you are supposed to put both your cover letter your resume as an attachment, and in the body of your email state, "Attached are my cover letter and resume." Are you kidding me? No, you put your damned cover letter in the email body. Attention spans are at an all-time low, and chances are the recipient will be too damned lazy to open any attachment. You have mere seconds to make an impression, to lose those seconds expecting them to go through the extra hassle of opening an attachment is just plain idiotic. Then, he went on about how you need to be careful about what version of Word to save your document as. I finally couldn’t bear the stupidity any longer and said, "Excuse me, but if you save it as a PDF you won’t need to worry about word processor versions." His reply was, "What if they don’t have Acrobat?" Rrrrrrrriiiiiiight, because Acrobat is one of those really rare obscure programs that you've gotta pay for! Good grief. I left and never went back.

Part 2

Despite that gawd-awful experience (probably because I was growing desperate), I decided to give this institution a second chance, and visited the Quincy location in April 2014, thinking that maybe a different location that's closer to the city might serve me a little better (it didn't).

I made an appointment and arrived with the secretarial/administrative resume and cover letter I had attempted to patch together using pieces of my now-defunct design career. I was introduced to a woman who was assigned to me, and I sat down at her desk and briefly explained my situation. I dryly confessed that I was probably going to commit suicide come September if nothing comes my way -- I was merely speaking matter-of-factly and certainly not looking for sympathy as I’ve learned nobody gives a damn when you’re suicidal. Sure enough, she got nasty with me and lectured me about how her situation is no better, something along the lines of "Hey, I lost my career, too, and now look where I am, do you think I wanna be here?" She agreed to have a look at my resume and cover letter, and I returned the following week at which point she presented me with the rewritten versions. Two things that I recall were: 1) the resume was NOT formatted for an ATS, it had columns, bullets, decorative separator lines, etc., all things that will make an ATS reject it immediately because it can't be scanned; and 2) the cover letter salutation was "Dear Hiring Manager." Dear Hiring Manager??? Um, no, the proper salutation for a business letter when you don’t know the recipient’s name is Ladies and Gentlemen for when the letter goes to a group, and Dear Sir/Madam when it goes to a single unknown-gender title.

I walked out and never went back. After a month of serious soul-searching, I enrolled in a CELTA certification course and began to prepare for a new life overseas.

Rhode Island

Recall that back in August 2015 my second gig at Fidelity had come to an unexpected end, leaving me once again without a job. For the first time in my life, I filed for unemployment benefits, and once again I began preparing to leave America to teach English overseas. I immediately received a summons from the state that I had to attend an orientation at one of their netWORKri centers as a prerequisite to receiving benefits. I arrived with printouts of the 1,500 job rejection emails I had received over the previous three years just to see if it would elicit some kind of reaction (it didn’t, not one person acknowledged the fucktardness of my situation). During the orientation they explained that I had to apply for three jobs a week and they gave me a double-sided sheet of paper on which to enter this information (company name/address, date applied, did I get an interview, did I get hired). Secondly, I had to log into their website every week and complete the “did you look for a job / did you get a job” questionnaire in order to continue receiving benefits. 

After the orientation, I sat with some guy at a computer who said he's going to help me get a job. LOLOLOLOL! I said, look, dude, here are 1,500 job rejections, there is NO hope for finding me a job here. He said, "Well, that's all gonna change now because I'm here and I’m gonna help you." I held back my laughter at this (did he really believe it, or was he just good at reciting the same line over and over to others like me?).

Here's what he did for me. He showed me the job posting page on their website. I glanced over his shoulder and saw a list full of jobs that I had already applied for and already been rejected from months earlier. When I pointed at one of them and said that I didn’t even get a phone screening despite being 100% qualified, he asked me the most idiotic question: “Did you call them?” Newsflash, dude who hasn't searched for work in twenty years: It’s NOT 1995 anymore. Not only is there NO way to even locate a phone number or contact person to “call,” but many companies will blacklist you for doing this (it's also not possible to locate a hiring manager for a job that doesn't exist).

He then went over the piece of paper I had to complete itemizing my job applications. And, that was it. Some help, huh? Yeah, just apply online like I’ve been doing for the past three years, that'll do it! Because these 1,500 rejections (on which he wouldn't even comment) don't mean a thing. Oh, but LOOK! Now I've got this fucking sheet of paper where I'm putting the name of the company and address and checking a box saying "Hired? Y/N" – oh, wow, THIS IS REALLY GONNA MAKE A DIFFERENCE! This is gonna make companies take notice of me!!!!! Lookie, Mr. Hiring Manager (*snark*), I’m applying for your advertised job along with 500 other people but I’m using a piece of paper to mark that I applied!

The final act of silliness I had to perform in order to "earn" my unemployment benefits was to attend one of their job-hunting workshops. None of the titles looked worthy of my time – like the usual “how to write a resume” nonsense (I had already hired a professional resume writer to make my resume keyword-compliant, and I was still getting rejected) – but as I had no choice I randomly chose the job interview workshop. Once again, it was full of advice straight out of 1995 along with a few modern tidbits of utter nonsense, like, "Be sure to dress professionally for your telephone interview!" For those attendees who chimed in with bad stories of inconsiderate and incompetent interviewers, the presenter had no advice to offer, further confirmation that “just shut up and take the abuse” is the rule to live by today.

 

When I returned a month later as required with my completed sheet listing my job applications, I sat with a different person from the guy I met with the first time – what happened to my personal advocate assigned to me and who cared so much about helping me? – and explained that not only did I not get a single interview from any of these jobs but I know for a fact that none of them even reviewed my portfolio (I explained how I have something called visitor tracking on my website). She just listened without commenting, looked over the list, and that was the end of that.

Did anyone in this crummy place actually DO anything to help me here? Like, I dunno, maybe get on the telephone and fucking CALL some of these companies on my list and ask them why they couldn't be bothered to even look at my applications? Oh, heavens, that would require a little effort. Remember, I'm the lazy one here. I'm the one who needs to be humiliated and reminded that it's all my fault that Fidelity fucked me over.

The final infuriating conclusion to this disgraceful display of state government uselessness was the summons to jury duty I received one month later (the court confirmed my name got into their system because I had the nerve to file for unemployment).