Web knowledge as a means of entry to the field of graphic design

Alan worked in the web sector of graphic design. Web design involves a knowledge of technology and the related skill to construct a website. It requires as Mok, (1996, p. 110) observes, design expertise and understanding at a number of levels. Graphic designers who have previously worked in two-dimensional organization of information in a flat published page, need to also understand in web design, the dimensions of time and space.

Programmers versed in the requirements of web structure and navigation do not necessarily have an understanding of graphic design to be able to handle visual or brand development aspects of a website design (Bell, 1999). In this case study Alan refers to the way in which the term web-designer may sometimes be used to describe the work of these programmers and technologists whose main area of expertise is usually in the technology aspects of web design. However the visual aspects of web design that graphic designers can bring to web design are important. These two aspects of web design necessitate for some design firms, bringing in the services of technology specialists to construct the ‘architecture’ of the websites that they design.

Alan offered technical as well as visual and brand-development design expertise to his clients. He had had no formal design training and the case shows how his knowledge sources varied from others in the graphic design field. Apart from the acquired knowledge available through those in his firm, with a greater design background than himself, he had a strong dependence on knowledge from the web community where objectified cultural capital⁷⁴ could be accessed. Alan had come to depend heavily on knowledge gained from the web community in addition to the cultural capital he could gain from others in the firm. In this account, consideration is given to various ways that knowledge, beyond the necessary technical knowledge, can be seen in his practice or be seen to underlie it.

Background

Alan who was in his late thirties, entered the design field through a circuitous route after having initially established credentials in business studies. His trajectory between his early education in business studies and his ultimate position as a web-designer was characterised by a readiness to acquire knowledge through self-education in order to move from one position to the next. His own personal drive comes through in his account of his divergent

74 Bourdieu’s concept of objectified cultural capital refers to knowledge that is made available in published or in an openly accessible form. Refer to Angie case study (p. 119) for an explanation of forms of capital.

career path and is visible in his description of his early family life. Alan’s family

background revealed strong parental influence that directed him to make his own way in the world, and to develop a strong work ethic. Of his parents he observed:

Generally they were pretty firm but fair and we didn’t really have a privileged upbringing because we weren’t wealthy. So there was a strong work ethic instilled which basically said “work for what you get. Not that you’re on your own”. They supported us with anything really, that we did when we were growing up. But there was a big portion of "get out there and do it yourself". I was fairly social . . . a small group of friends . . . also quite transient, so things came and went.

This group was not influential in the formation of Alan’s values or ideas, neither did he see that he was very influenced by friends in those early years, because in his early childhood he moved around and lost ties with them. His family influence was evident through their art activities. Alan was introduced to painting and drawing through the interests of his

grandmother and also his father, although there was no direct encouragement from them to develop his artistic interests.

My grandmother was an artist. And right from as far back as I can remember all the kids were in the personalised paintings that she’d do and she’d always said that my father was the artist out of her children as well. So there was always a bit of “maybe I can do this” type thinking going on. There was no real encouragement from my parents to pursue creative arts. It was a more practical type of push in terms of schooling and things like that. It was always to earn the money to ‘do this, go this way’. There was just the odd occasion when we were talking about Grandma’s work and then occasionally Dad would do some sketching.

Alan recalled that in his high school years, he failed to take advantage of the art

opportunities offered. He observed that rather than taking art, which might have presented him with greater satisfaction, he had chosen to select the subjects his parents expected him to take.

I went to an all boys school so there was a lot less focus on the opposite sex and more on what you were doing with your life, I guess. Saying that, the boy’s school that I went to was quite a conservative school. So when I was in high school, art was not a priority for the school . . . as well as [for] most of the kids there. There was an art department, which was basically in the corner of the grounds. I did one year in art in the fourth form and then after that it was on with practical subjects, to be honest. I was still quite into sport. So I played football and . . . but socially . . . to be honest, I got in with a pretty bad crowd . . . well not a bad crowd, but a very unmotivated crowd at high school who actually, one by one, dropped out of high school while I stayed on. So there was just a lot of lazing around after, socially and not much in terms of proactive activities. What I

do recall was, because of the subjects I was doing at high school and thinking about tertiary [education] and what was going to happen, there was still that pressure that I couldn’t go after the arts. I would be disappointing people if I did. So there was always that . . . you know . . . torn between what you want to do and what you should do. In our last year in seventh form at high school we all had to go through this kind of evaluation process and the careers advisor, before we went on to wherever we went and there was always a bent to career-minded subjects and English was probably the most

‘artiest’ subject that I did in my seventh form year and that was definitely not given priority.

There was no reference in the interviews to Alan developing any technical interests or leanings in his teenage years that might have led him to select a career in a computer related field. His first employment was as a management trainee for a hotel. After being made redundant from this he completed a Diploma in Business and it was at that time that he started to learn about computing.

I worked for a couple of years before I went to the College of Education, to do a Business Diploma⁷⁵. So I kind of . . . like . . . hooked right back to high school to get where I worked, straight back into business and that kind of subject matter. I had a position in a hotel run by a couple of guys who owned two hotels and they eventually became a general manager of both of them and in that position I was asked to start forming my own thinking in terms of promoting the hotel and its benefits. So I started getting into trying to build business and learning how to go about that through

promotional material. And I’d always had a keen interest in computers so the two kind of merged and I started doing a lot of the design and so I started designing back then.

The Diploma in Business - now it’s the New Zealand Diploma in Business or something - was quite new and they were just trialing computing papers in with the normal accounting and management papers and I just happened to put myself into the advanced computing paper. And from there it was computers were where I’m based.

His career trajectory involved a move to the web design work, which came out of his computer interests. He had managed to build on to his IT⁷⁶ knowledge and move into web-design. In his description, the distinction between the graphic and technical aspects of web design had become blurred, and once productive in web design, he was able to offer work in other areas of graphic design, to his clients.

Before I came in here as a part owner of my team, I had my own business since about 1996 as a sole trader with strategic partners that would do the heavy IT things. I’d do the light and funky coding bit with all the user interface design and stuff like that and as

75 This was a part-time course outside the College’s fulltime curriculum.

76 Abbreviation for information technology.

time passed I just became, I guess more proficient at the design side of things and had clients that were then more open to the web design that I come up with going back into print and other media. I actually do quite a bit of logo and brand work.

Alan was unable to explain how he had gained proficiency as a graphic designer, other than through loosely described experience. He was dependent on a self-taught approach. The experience in marketing and his computing knowledge may well have offset the limited knowledge he had gathered to this point in his trajectory in the graphic design field. His position in the web design field could be distinguished from those who had set themselves up as web designers, with technical backgrounds and with computer skills, but who were unable to satisfy clients’ needs in a way that may reflect adequate levels of graphic design knowledge and expertise. Nevertheless, having had no had formal design training of any description, he had had to learn through experience. There had been mentors in his

workplace and others who had influenced him, including colleagues he had had discussions with. He had, on one hand, been working in a quite insular way, but on the other hand, he felt that he had been quite successful in picking up necessary understanding of graphic design.

Present employment

Compared with his early graphic design experience, Alan’s present situation in the company he owned enabled him to build on and to learn from the experienced creative directors working within the same office open plan office space. His physical work-space comprising computer, screen and printer revealed little evidence of any collection of design items of personal interest or any documentation of design conceptualisation other than progressive print-outs of work in progress. However, the larger office space in which he worked provided integration with those around him. He had access to the same design reference material as the designers there and was privy to the discussions about various design projects at a vicarious level through his proximity to other creative people in the social space of the office. He was also able to extend his knowledge of graphic design through collaboration in the team-structures used on some projects. Alan was able to openly acknowledge the contribution others had made to his on-going acquisition of cultural capital relative to practice.

I’ve picked up lots from those around me, really. The fellow over there with the cap on is Andy and he’s Creative Director here and we met five years ago and he’s been a big influence throwing ideas back and forth, but not just that, looking and seeing things.

He did not see any inadequacy in building up his design knowledge in the way that he had, neither did he have an unrequited desire for education in graphic design. Alan relied instead,

on slowly accumulating design experience or accepting the level of knowledge and experience he could acquire on the job, to be adequate for his needs.

It’s probably a slow way to learn because there’s not the structure in place that covers the elements of design and the conceptual design. But I kind of think of design as a personality thing. It’s been utilised a lot and by the length of time that’s taken me to get where I am and that probably could have been cut in half with a structured course. But I still got there so . . .

Initially, Alan had been reliant on computer knowledge in web design to enable him to enter the field of graphic design. His understanding of visual aspects of graphic design and the approaches to concept development involved in the work he produced, had been acquired both through his own autodidacticism and through learning from those in the open plan office he shared. He had been enabled to increasingly move from an early reliance on technology to assume greater cultural capital and with it, an increasing credibility as a graphic designer able to produce brand identity work and other graphic design.

Web communities

Alan did not join in the professional discourse that might have been accessible by belonging to professional design groups like the Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ), or form any other external social networks apart from the associations he had with those in

companies he worked with. In keeping with others in the web-design community he tended to be more insular, observing that “Web designers usually sit in dark rooms by themselves”.

Kind of one way kind of interactivity, as I said before, with the US web design community, and their pod-casts, their forums, and I kind of absorb a lot, one way, and locally, I have a couple of designers that I do bounce ideas off, but they are generally designers that work with the companies that I work with.

Being outside the design discourses at an academic or professional level, Alan had not had the opportunity to hear of the software experimentation in the wider computer field, offered in live presentations at conferences at an international level. He had, however, been able to learn of aspects of this through the web version of Wired magazine, from their website. The information offered on these sites had been presented to suit the web media and the interests of the web audience.

I do know of . . . not people, but I have seen quite a bit through . . . there’s a website called Wired.com, and then there’s an experimental section in which Flash^®

developers/designers use technology that I use quite a bit in my work called

Macromedia^® Flash^®. Which is vector animation software, which produces very small file sizes. And you see some quite eclectic stuff that these guys are just experimenting

with vectors, shapes and maths and design. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff that they do in Flash Media^®. Which is interesting, but as yet there’s no application for it.

Although Alan was unable to draw on the cultural capital available to those designers who had had the opportunity to study at a design school, or benefit from the ongoing knowledge sharing that may have come out of contact with other designers in the field, he was able to draw on objectified knowledge (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 243) in the form of published media and the information and ideas transmitted through the web via online communities in the Internet sites that he visited regularly. He accessed two key web design information sources; the online web technical community and the Open Source web design community⁷⁷. By accessing the online web technical community, he could learn of the ongoing technical changes in the web field and, through this knowledge, help to preserve his position as a technical expert.

Often with the web, some of the user effects and some of the things that we do, require that technology knowledge. It’s not simply a matter of placement on a page and how things look. Graphic design on the web is about how things move and how things work as well as how they look.

Having come into web design, via a technology path, and gradually working more and more in graphic design, Alan had the need to draw on the templates available free on the web from Open Source Web Design (oswd.com), which has as its objective to “provide the open source web community with quality web design which is both organised and good-looking”

(Skettino, 2006). Nevertheless, it was not enough for Alan to have access to these templates.

He had to have, as for any forms of cultural capital, the expertise to be able to use them for his own purposes, to be able to derive benefit from them (Johnson, 1993). The strong reliance on self-learning in Alan’s graphic design practice could also be seen in the way he acquired an understanding of technology, because of the changing knowledge base, fundamental to the ongoing development of technical aspects of web-design.

Especially in the IT field where design crosses over into technology and the use of software quite a bit, there is always going to be a large amount of self learning involved because technology is shifting all the time but you have to . . . To be honest I think the academic sector has been quite . . . they seem to be quite slow to pick up new

technologies and qualifications of new technologies.

Knowledge of social worlds

The computer interests that Alan had started during his tertiary training years had enabled him to be involved in a field in which an understanding of media and culture industries was

77 For a definition of Open Source refer to p. 31.

important. Media was reflected not just in the web, but in magazines and other graphic communication. In Alan’s responses, it is hard to see importance being placed on a need to acquire lifestyle knowledge relative to his web design and graphic design work. His reading was more closely related to the technology side of his web work. There was little recognition of the need to look, in his own time outside his working day, at other knowledge that may inform his work as a designer. Alan gave no cues that he had sought information about human factors as they affected consumers, or made any dedicated attempts to keep up to date with any other social influences that may impact on how companies function. He expressed no opinions about the potential for a web designer to be extending his or her knowledge base in ways that would give them a broader field of knowledge to enable them to make more informed decisions about aspects of their day-to-day work.

In document The significance of knowledge of social contexts to concept development in graphic design practice in New Zealand (Page 151-167)