dp_danpeterson's Profile

Comment Threads

• Stephen Octavius Hill commented on Just Add Water
  A Black-Eye Black and company are suggesting to their target audience that this "complicated" thing called design will be done by their A-list Ready Media designers so that they can concentrate on what is really important--"the Content". Sorry, design is content. Content is design. They are suggesting a clothesline from which to hang content. In the beginning there is the idea, then the creation or fulfillment of the idea. There is a reason that the idea is placed at the beginning. Then everything else follows suite. Every decision reinforces the creation. It’s as old and as simple as the old...
• Cathy Cotter commented on Just Add Water
  Interesting that I should read this the same day that I came upon “Add Water and Talent”, print mags/Steven Heller article on the “Learn Graphic Design Fast”, a 3-month program at Shillington College in Austrailia. Design outrage. The message is out. We should be paying attention but how can we? Everything we know is being challenged. Graphic designers devalued. We need to seek out our value and hope it allows us to do what we love and continue to love what we do. I do believe that the visual world will ultimately continue to improve as it always has. So...
• Rich Hollant commented on Just Add Water
  There are precedents to this throughout our industry. You can build a website from templates using Wordpress (or less sophisticated tools). Our invoices are templated. Microsoft Word offers templates for every document imaginable. We can buy well-cut and considered type for $30 a face. I'm old enough to remember the outrage when cheap downloadable type was available—it was going to be the end of design as we knew it—and in a way, it was. It made design better... I got to spend more time thinking ans less time specing type and waiting for galleys. In fact, a pretty talented designer...
• Rich Hollant commented on Just Add Water
  Hi Paula: I referenced you in a post at the end of this chain. I hope I was fair. Please let me know if I wasn't. Best regards....
• Joseph Caserto commented on Just Add Water
  Well said, Mitch. We all know that good templates can save designers who know how to use them a lot of time, but whenever a new technical innovation comes out—the Mac itself, QPS, K4—publishing companies want to know if investing in it will allow them to cut budgets and jobs. My concern is that companies will try to use these pre-fab pubs as a way to hire less-experienced professionals and pay them less, in an attempt to make more money, and may only realize how misguided this strategy is once the quality suffers. The truth is that technology used efficiently...