Not enough graphic designers working in television industry

[kamomil]

Note: I realize I am supposed to tag my entry, but I am getting the following error:
Client error: Not allowed to add tags to entries in this journalI have noticed something working in television, and I thought I'd let you guys know

Comments

[kamomil]

I read over the posting guidelines and that was not mentioned.

I am pretty sure that when I posted here before, I was warned that I had to tag my entry, so I was trying to be a good neighbor. Now that I think about it, maybe it was that I didn't give it a title.

[thetar]

You have valid points here. Must of the design in TV is crap. The top 10 markets look worse than +100 markets. Owned and Operated Fox affiliates look horrible on air (Fox 5 NY, FOX 11 LA are some). Type is always clunky and too big. Everything looks the same from station to station. A lot of stations look the same from market to market as the parent company buys one package (design template) and runs that on every station they own (Hearst and Belo often do this

[kamomil]

Thanks, I feel like I'm not so alone.

Maybe I did the right thing not pursuing a print graphic design career. I don't create things from scratch at my work, it doesn't bother me at all.

I am happy to ensure that any graphics conform to the station's style guides. I move around fonts, check the spelling, and drop images into OTS graphics, and I can do so until the cows come home. I focus my attention on making things more efficient. I get to use my spelling skills all day, so I feel like my brain is put to good use. I am Gen X, it seemed I had fewer options anyhow, so I am happy to have the job I do have.

Maybe my next rant will be about how journalists should be able to spell!

[thetar]

No worries. And it just isnt TV there are other place that struggle as well. Meanwhile there are many places that re trying very hard to do god design and rely on talented people to help them accomplish that mission. All in ll it is about education. No one is born a good client, consumer of design or even as a good designer. It takes education and growing and sharing and working to make things better.

[samuraiartguy]

HEAR ya.

That's consistent with what I have been hearing from the industry. There are still folks out there that appreciate good design, a bunch of them are clients. But it's becoming a tougher way to make a living. However, education is becoming an major issue... I now have a kid in college, at Buffalo State for Engineering. THANK THE GODS. But he's at a SUNY school, and the enterprise will cost about 80K... But a BFA in Graphic Design here in NYC at private 4-year schools like Pratt, Parsons or SVA will cost a kid (and/or families) something like 250K. Holy FRAK.

And graduate to be an intern. Yikes. I'm pretty good at this, and love it. But It's getting harder to recommend it as a career.

[charlycrash]

Oblique point, but.. I'm not really sure design is something you can be taught in any sense other than being taught how to operate software. I certainly don't think it's something you're born with either - I don't believe in natural artistic talent - but to my mind it's like saying "I did a degree in good taste". Y'know?

[antigraphic]

You can definitely teach design! Composition, color theory, art history, production, those are learnable skills. Teaching someone how Photoshop and Illustrator works is not teaching graphic design any more than Drivers Ed teaches someone how to build cars.

[kamomil]

Really? You can teach someone Illustrator, bam, they are a graphic designer?

You need to know what things affect readability. If you can read it without getting a headache, or if you can get the point of an ad in a quick glance, then it works. You don't just slap things on a screen, you need to think through what things will get in the way of a person understanding it quickly.

[charlycrash]

Really? You can teach someone Illustrator, bam, they are a graphic designer?

I think you misunderstand.

You can teach someone how to use software, but I don't feel like taste is something you can teach, and you need both to be a graphic designer. You can also teach someone rules of thumb, but that's not really having a basic feel for things. Which is what you need, and it's something you develop outside of a classroom.

[samuraiartguy]

Graphic Design is a embattled industry these days. The perception that any jackass with Creative Suite... or *groan* MS Publisher and Corel Photo Paint is a designer is hard to push against.

A LOT of my work comes from small business owners who tried to do it themselves, and discovered that good design is more than software. But I am still from time to time astounded by the "throw weight" of my digital tools. My ability to line up lines of type with a T-Square and triangle is a lost art, to the point where some younger designers wonder what the hell I am taking about, or what a rubber cement pickup is, or what the heck it's for.

[kamomil]

Haha my experiences in a high school printing course prepared me in odd ways for what I do now. We used ruby lith to mask off things we didn't want the camera to pick up, and the "mask" thing shows up as red in Photoshop and it did in Quantel Paintbox (when we still used it)

Also my graphic design teacher showed me a trick to equally space out lines with no math - use a ruler at an angle, spanning the height of the area, and then mark your equally distant lines using the inches on the ruler. I use a variation of that idea in Illustrator - I make equidistant marks that line up with the ruler, then I scale it to match the actual size of whatever it is I need to make equidistant markings - still no math required (though I love math).

How do you mean line up type with a T square and triangle? I used rubber cement, but for sticking things to illustration board.