This research paper examines the role of the graphic designer and recent trends in graphic design and printing in Melbourne. It incorporates interviews with graphic designer Felicity Hayward from The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and with printing representative Marita McCausland, from Bambra Press. It also draws on research from design texts and the Internet.

ACMI, located at Federation Square, is a cultural institution that celebrates, explores and promotes the culture of the moving image in all its forms – film, television and digital culture. It specialises in education and exhibition publishing, areas of great interest to me and promotes a strong art and design aesthetic. It is for these reasons that I chose to interview Felicity Hayward. I believe she can best give a sense of where graphic design is at the moment and what the future trends are likely to be.

corresFelicity does mainly print and exhibition design for ACMI. She creates the ACMI corporate brand identity which includes their logo, colour palettes and imagery, right down to invitations, annual reports and even Word templates for HR. She’s also responsible for designing the ACMI calendar What’s On.

In addition to creating ACMI’s brand, she also creates their Exhibition identity – all the components in the gallery like panels, vinyl texts, labels, signage, posters, flyers, and then all the print advertising and TV campaigns.

Some of the exhibitions Felicity has designed are Pixar, Eyes Lies and Illusions and Correspondences. Felicity’s job begins when she receives a brief from the marketing and exhibition design departments about the new show and from that brief she creates “a look and feel, a logo, type, and image treatment, a set of parts that’s a kind of toolkit to create all of the outputs that I need.” With Correspondences, she wanted to re-create some of the themes that the artists used: landscapes and people. She picked two images from each filmmaker. “To talk about the cultural references of the show I designed two patterns, one that was based on Islamic, Moorish designs and one that was based on Spanish pattern. I overlaid the images and the title Correspondences was sat in between and overlapped both the images… it was about this dialogue they had with each other.”

The hardest part of Felicity’s job? “It’s tricky when you come in with something you feel answers the brief and then it can get compromised especially when there is a committee of people involved in the approval and projects can be changed so much and so diluted that the actual end product doesn’t work very well because it has moved so far away from the original brief.”

Trends in actual graphic design are hard to define now Felicity believes. In the past, there were more specific movements, for example, the Bauhaus movement or homogenous 1950s design, whereas now “there is so much stuff going on made possible by the Internet. There is more exposure to international and Australian design.“ Once Felicity would buy five to six design books or magazines a month but “often, by the time those magazines and books were printed the design was already tired.” All she does now is look at blogs and keep a digital reference library in iPhoto of “cool, interesting stuff that I can refer to. I scroll through and pull out illustrations, fonts, graphic design, a text hierarchy, colour palette or image treatment that appeals to me.”

isnotFelicity likes simple, clear modernist design and that influences how she designs but “I’m also into that really illustrative typography. I don’t do that myself because I don’t have the skills. The kind of stuff they have in Is Not Magazine, how they have illustrative type treatment.” Felicity believes that three to five years ago there was a trend towards more geometric design, whereas now there is more illustration and typography. For example, she says, “instead of using, say the font Klavika, people are commissioning illustrators to come up with font designs.”

Indeed working in a niche area as a graphic designer and as an illustrator makes your services more marketable. With the proliferation of the computer into the graphic industry, plus desktop publishing software, digital cameras, scanners; and high-quality printers, it seems that almost anyone can be a designer. While graphic designers today need to think digital, being able to do storyboards, roughs, and mockups in freehand sketch form is also important. While technology is great and will continue to improve the graphics industry, being able to do graphics unplugged will remain a marketable skill. Web designers competent in PHP, Flash, and other programming languages are also in demand. Knowing how to create a graphically sound, functional, interactive website gives you a competitive edge as does experience in design considerations for social networking sites (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) as well as mobile phone applications. These requirements are only slated to grow more in our future mass communication world.

TRENDS IN PRINTING.

One of the most important printing industry trends has been the electronic delivery of files as desktop publishing takes full control of the printing process. The main software packages being used for desktop publishing are Quark and In Design which are used for layout, Photoshop for image manipulation and Illustrator for vector based logos, illustration, shapes, and graphic devices. There has been a shift in the past five years away from people using Quark Express to using the Adobe Creative Suite. Part of the Adobe family is Acrobat, which can turn pretty much everything into a portable document file (pdf), and files can then be easily sent to print. With Quark however you would have to send native files and there was the risk of things going missing or changing during the production and printing process. Of course, there are advantages as well as disadvantages, for example, an advantage would be if you had last minute changes you need to make the printers could do them for you, but there was also the risk of fonts defaulting, for example, Helvetica font often defaulted to Courier. “Pdf’s make the turnaround faster,” says Felicity, “and especially with things like advertisements because you can compress the files small enough so you can email them.”

With the emerging need for the electronic delivery of graphics and images, the film media process in printing is now obsolete. Printing trends have moved away from being press-centric to printer-centric. The advancement of digital technologies such as direct imaging offset presses and inkjet printers have made colour printing more cost effective.

Marita McClausand, a printing representative from Bambra Press, explains how her boss recently went to a conference in Japan and all the big printers there were digital. “With offset printing, you have more scope in terms of mixing inks but there are more cost in terms of setting up the plates for printing. The beauty of digital printing is that you can print straight from the computer without the setup costs. In the past people may have been wary of digital printing because of the quality – digital printers used to use standard toner – like photocopiers use, which tends to sit on the paper and looks more powdery.”

A recent development, however, has been the introduction of the HP Indigo Press, which uses liquid toner instead, producing the same effect you would find with offset printing. “While it’s more expensive it’s better quality,” says Marita. A consequence of this has been shorter printing production runs in an effort to compete with digital printing. “Whereas once a company would produce five hundred annual reports now they are printing fifty and putting it up on their website.” In addition, a greater volume of printing jobs has moved away from printing companies to those produced by desktop printing and offshore printing firms. Printing overseas in India and China where labour is cheap keeps printing costs down. One of the disadvantages of sending work overseas, however, is that it’s hard to do a press check and you have no control over the final job. By comparison, Felicity worked in Australia on a decorative arts and trade book for the Historic Houses Trust and spent three days checking each sheet to see if the colours were accurate and the lines fine. Another drawback with overseas jobs is: “that you need more lead-time and if you are working according to a tight deadline as we often do at ACMI this is impossible.“

One of the more positive trends in the printing industry is the environmentally sustainable changes being made. Bambra Press recycle waste paper, printing plates and plastic and timber packing materials. They use vegetable-based inks and use a vast range of green papers and are constantly looking for ways to make their footprint on the environment as green as possible. They are also proud to announce that Bambra is now a member of an international network of suppliers to receive Forest Stewardship Council Chain of Custody (FSC COC) certification. “And last week we won most environmentally conscious printer at the Printing Industry Awards,” says Marita.