How Many People Are Sitting in My Chair?
When I started as an art director, design was a team sport.
There were art directors and designers.
Typesetters.
Retouchers.
Production artists.
Photographers.
Illustrators.
Writers.
Prepress people.
Each person had a specialty, and you relied on all of them to get the finished piece out the door.
Then computers arrived.
And slowly, all those people started sitting in my chair.
Suddenly I wasn't just designing.
I was typesetting.
Retouching photographs.
Preparing files for production.
Writing copy.
Troubleshooting software.
Managing color.
Building presentations.
Creating websites.
Fixing files.
Explaining resolution.
I became my own IT department.
And occasionally, I became my IT department because a client broke my computer.
Just Undo That Last One
Years ago, I was restoring an old photograph on my Macintosh IIsi.
This was long before autosave, and the little IIsi was already working hard. I had discovered layers, and apparently believed the appropriate number of layers was all of them.
A client insisted on sitting beside me while I worked because he thought the restoration was taking too long.
At one point he said, “Just undo that last one.”
Then he reached over and hit a keyboard command.
On my Mac.
He was a PC guy.
Everything disappeared.
Hours of work.
I remember frantically trying to figure out what he'd done, searching the early Internet over an AOL dial-up connection while contemplating the remains of my afternoon.
Then he argued with me about the billable time it took to redo the work.
That experience taught me a rule I still use today:
You may watch. You may have an opinion. But do not touch my keyboard.
People sometimes laugh when I say it.
Those people are asked to step back.
300 DPI Meets Las Vegas
Of course, clients weren't responsible for every technical lesson I learned.
I once created a huge background graphic for a friend who had moved to Las Vegas.
It was going behind television newscasters—something like 180 inches across.
I knew print production, so naturally I built it at 300 dpi.
With multiple layers.
The file was around 400 MB, which at the time wasn't so much a file as a cry for help.
My friend loved it. He sent me roses and told me it was the best background they'd ever had.
The technical guy apparently had a somewhat different reaction.
Both of them were right.
The design worked beautifully. The file was ridiculous.
That's how we learned. The tools were changing underneath us, and the rules we knew from one medium didn't always apply to the next.
Then the Job Kept Growing
Desktop publishing didn't eliminate the need for expertise.
It simply moved more of that expertise onto fewer desks.
Today, on a single project, I may be the art director, designer, typesetter, retoucher, production artist, prepress technician, writer, proofreader, image restorer, presentation designer, webmaster, file troubleshooter and occasional IT department.
I check resolution. I check bleed. I check color spaces. I rebuild logos. I repair photographs. I notice when the supplied logo isn't actually the company's logo. I notice when something that looks perfectly fine on a monitor is going to fall apart in print.
And now there's another person sitting in my chair.
“AI Can Do That.”
That's the newest one.
Someone inevitably says, “AI can do that.”
And sometimes it can.
Until you look closely.
Suddenly nobody quite looks like themselves.
Hands have entered another dimension.
Logos have been creatively reinterpreted.
Type has become an unidentified language.
And everyone looks as though they've been sealed inside a plastic container.
Then the file comes to me.
Now my job isn't simply to design something.
It's to determine what AI changed, what it invented, what it destroyed, and whether any of it can be repaired without creating an entirely new problem.
AI is an extraordinary tool. I use it myself.
But “AI can do it” and “AI did it correctly” are two very different sentences.
And apparently, checking the difference is another person sitting in my chair.
“But I Can Do This Myself.”
Of course you can.
Or:
“I found someone who'll do it for $15.”
You probably did.
But the question isn't whether someone can operate the software.
The question is whether they know what they're looking at.
Do they know what's missing?
Do they know what will happen at the printer?
Do they know when a photograph doesn't contain enough information to reproduce at the requested size?
Do they know why a logo shouldn't be casually reconstructed?
Do they know which problems can be fixed—and which ones need to go back to the client before they become expensive?
More importantly:
Do they know what they don't know?
Software has made it extraordinarily easy to make something.
AI has made it extraordinarily easy to make even more things.
Experience is what tells you whether any of those things will actually work.
My first little Macintosh struggled because I gave it too many layers.
Today my computer can handle things I couldn't have imagined then.
But there are considerably more people sitting in my chair.
And somehow, we're all still expected to fit into the same hourly rate.
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