Noughties design – changes, developments and milestones of the last 10 years

With the end of a decade approaching it seems only proper to reminisce over the noughties and the changes they brought to our lives in the design industry. (Please feel free to add more)

1. Long live Indesign!

Finally we saw the end to the Quark Xpress monopoly. It was a long time coming and after Quark had rested on their laurels for more than a decade, the launch of Indesign was much-lauded! Can you remember the days of one undo, no layers and dodgy previewing? Design graduates don’t know they’re born!

2. OS X

I loved the Mac Classic operating system. It was a simple and uncomplicated design that did what it needed to. In fact, I thought it was all rather frivolous when OS 8 added shading and OS 9 included drop shadows, so you can imagine my dismay at the transparent sliding Dock with its camp Genie Effect and full colour icons the size of houses. Thank god I learned to switch most of that off and after using it for only one week OS9 suddenly seemed sooo last century. Which, of course, it was.

And while we’re on the subject of Mac – where is my Apple key? It seems to have disappeared off the keyboard in the last two years. What’s a command key? Another concession to PC users? A friend once told me he was sitting outside a Scottish pub one evening chatting to the Landlord. With a beer in his hand and the sun dropping behind the mountains he said, “This would be perfect if the midges would just go away.” The Landlord replied “Ahh but it’s the midges that keep all the  ***** away!” So, Mr Jobs if you are reading this…

3. Brandwagon

“Corporate Identity? What’s that? You don’t want that… oh no, you want this… a new improved type of Corporate Identity, called Brand Identity. It’s like Corporate Identity only better! In the 80’s and 90’s you thought you were the bees knees with your new Corporate Identity but you were wrong. What you need is this – a lovely new Brand Identity.”

Of course we all know there is a different level of thinking between Corporate Identity and Brand, but as everyone started talking Brand overnight a lot of companies carried on delivering Corporate Identities – and some still do.

Brand also spelled the end of a lot of the smaller, more groundbreaking design consultancies. Unfortunately, what were once exciting and dynamic places to work turned into huge, corporate, often witless, behemoths.

4. e

I don’t mean the drug because that’s all a bit 90’s. I mean words with an e prefix like e-mail or e-commerce and e-words – yes, even word has an e variant. It appears that all you need to do to put an internet/virtual bent on a service, product or application is to simply place an e on the front of an existing word. So now we have all read e-newsletters, sent e-cards, e-banked and I have even frequented an e-cademy! Is this an e-rant?

But don’t worry because if you are getting bored with e-words we now have i-words to mix things up a bit. This is particularly smart because not only does it indicate an electronic/computer based product, service or application it also hints that you, the user, is in complete control of how you use it!

5. Hot desking

The beginning of this century promised more flexibility in our working lives. A desk at work was no longer a necessity. All you needed was a laptop and the information superhighway! Imagine the money employers could save as they scaled back premises, reduced energy bills and paper usage as their employees delivered work electronically from their home, their cars or even the park.

Unfortunately the dream was destroyed as the dotcom bubble burst and it wasn’t the desks that were made redundant.

6. Social Networking

Who would have thought this could be so contentious. Mention Facebook around the table in a pub and watch the debate unfold in front of you. If you think it is “voyeurism at its most lazy”, “a stage for the attention seeking”, “makes people socially inept” or just that it is “not as good as it used to be” (?!?) it is still undoubtedly a useful tool for users, marketers and researchers alike. More interestingly, imagine what a valuable resource it will be for historians and genealogists in years to come. Social networking is still in its infancy and it will only get more sophisticated.

And while we’re on the subject – who can forget the plane that landed on the Hudson River in New York? Footage was recorded and uploaded to Twitter before a News Agency had even heard about it. (More about this below at number 10)

7. Media

Internet has changed media. It has made it more convenient and consumers love convenience. Wouldn’t we all like to choose when we listen to music, watch a film or read the news? Broadband and 3G have enabled this and the consequences are huge.

Licensing of films, TV and music will have to change. No longer can it afford to be region specific and the way artists and publishers charge for their products will need a major rethink. Amplify these issues with the ease that files can be copied and shared and you have a major headache. Services like iTunes and Spotify have started addressing some of these issues but they are still a very long way from having all the answers.

Perhaps the change needs to come from the artists. The internet, MySpace in particular, has allowed artists to bypass the record companies. This may seem good for the struggling artist when trying to get their music “out there” but it has seriously harmed the profits of those who make it big.

The only way to make money as a musician these days, it seems, is to tour constantly. One internet downside appears to have become a very big upside for live music. The impersonal relationship fans now have with their bands via the internet may have led to the massive increase in attendance to live gigs and concerts.

Even the news is changing. Consumers now expect to get news for free from the internet and newspaper readership is down. Some publishers have responded by offering free newspapers to mass audiences like London commuters. These newspapers rely solely on advertising for revenue and sensationalism for popularity. The result is that they seem dumbed down and not very impartial.

The recent challenge by Rupert Murdoch to charge Google and others for displaying his news content is an interesting area to watch. This is the first time a prominent person in the industry has questioned how his empire survives in this world of instant and, so far, free news. Others will follow and it may only be a matter of time before we will have to subscribe to get quality news services. Mind you, if it meant I could catch up on the BBC website (as a non-licence fee payer) without adverts, I’d pay.

How does this effect our industry? Consumers are gradually abandoning traditional media for the internet and our clients will be shifting their attentions and spend even more over the coming decade. It comes as no surprise that during the most recent recession spend in digital media continued to grow as the rest of the industry contracted.

8. Green

Over the millenium I designed a logo standards document for Arthur Andersen that marked the end of over indulgent design for me. A polypropylene folder housing examples of logo reproduction on anything from leather to stainless steel sheets, using various techniques from screen printing to laser engraving. Then, to top it all off, the folder was placed inside a dip-moulded, near flouro, orange rubber slip case. A year later Arthur Andersen changed their name to Andersen and the whole lot went off to the landfill. A year after that Andersen went bust in the wake of the Enron scandal.

I remember thinking then that this was probably the last time anything like this would be as extravagant as the general trend was shifting towards a more sustainable future.

Since then ours and related industries have changed dramatically. Not only in the way clients brief us but also in the way we go about our daily business. Vegetable based inks, paper recycling, streamlined printing technologies, recycled and sustainable papers and electronic delivery to name a few.

9. Google

OK, Google officially started in 1998 but it started to gain traction in 2000 by selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and click-throughs. This model of selling keyword advertising was actually pioneered by Goto.com before being acquired by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Search Market. So Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.

Then just when you thought Google couldn’t get anymore useful, they added an image search…and then some.

10. Realtime

John Simpson, BBC reporter, was on the front line when troops took control of Kabul during the Allied invasion to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was reporting in realtime using a satellite phone with an in-built camera. This was one of the first times this technology had been used to report on a war and it’s portability allowed for up-to-the-minute updates, 24 hours a day, from the centre of the action.

In the heat of it all, John Simpson – who to be fair was risking his life to bring the reports – inadvertently reported that “we have liberated Kabul”. The fallout from this was unstoppable. News agencies jumped on these words, and for the next three years, papers portrayed John Simpson as an arrogant, self-important man who thought he had been instrumental in liberating Afghanistan. John immediately apologised but it was too late.

Traditional reporting allows journalists the time to write a report and edit it before broadcast but consumers insatiable appetite for news and this new technology had made John’s report impossible to retract leaving egg on his and the BBC’s faces.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with the design industry and branding? Instantaneous messaging, tweets, blogs, updates and emails are all little calling cards from us and effect how people perceive us and our client’s brands. Ill-judged publications, written in haste, can damage our reputation, products and services.

Just because we can publish instantaneously doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Perhaps this post included.