When I started out on my own in the early 1990s after 10 years of working for other creative firms, it was a very different world from today—VERY different. Computers and PCs were still new and we were all exploring how to use them in our daily business lives. The internet and email didn’t exist. Music was definitely better—yes, it really was. Phones were mostly land lines, we used answering machines, and very few people had car phones. Long distance phone calls were still a thing. On the home front, we designers were happily (yes happily) using drawing boards with t-squares, ammonia blueprint machines, dark rooms and paste-up boards.
And the most important thing? Projects and paying clients were plentiful. They were everywhere and I never had to go scrounging around for work. My office phone rang all the time.
I know my age is showing. So what? Back in the 90s, age was respected as something called experience and talent. Today? Not so much. Today, we celebrate mediocrity.
Do I resent the technologies that came along and which I was forced to learn? Heck no. I love my computers and the amazing software that gives me access to tools that allow me do all manner of complex tasks and client presentations. I can explore a logo in infinite colors in the time it took to do just one color in the early 90s. A client can make all manner of “unreasonable” change requests to a CAD drawing and I can make those changes without needing to do a whole new drawing and in a tenth of the time.
Technologies are amazing, but not everything gets better because of it. As an example, for the first few years of running my business, getting Thank You notes was common. I kept all of them. I considered each one to be special and a sign that the work done for them meant something. However, as time wore on, getting Thank You notes became less common, until it finally stopped altogether—somewhere around the beginning of the new century. It is my belief that getting Thank Yous became an extinct practice because, thanks to technology, people no longer value experience, talent or the work put into their projects. They wrongly believe that computers do all the work now and talent is no longer needed.
For instance, I routinely put together site maps and building elevations in CAD format. Most of the time, I’m forced to use satellite images and photographs as source material. Google Maps and Street Views is simply awesome for this. This means my site maps and elevations are done entirely by hand. It makes for more thorough and professional presentations, but it also takes time. Do clients notice? They used to, but they don’t any more. They seem to think, ‘Well computers do all the work now, and I don’t need to thank a computer’. Add to this, with the age of AI coming into vogue, that attitude is bound to get monumentally worse. Talent will become even less than meaningless and appreciation for anything will be gone.
Is technology totally to blame? No. The other main reason for the declines I’ve noticed is economic. Economic you ask? Yes. In the 1980s, America’s wealth class, with the help of the Reagan Administration, crafted an entirely new economic and taxation system. They called it Reaganomics and 45 years later, it’s still our economic system today. It’s what created the billionaire class and decimated the middle class. Today, the middle class is less than half the size it was in the 1970s. Wages flattened out, unions disappeared. Over 60,000 factories and the jobs that relied on them were shipped overseas. Trillions of dollars of wealth and assets held by the middle class were transferred to the new billionaire class.
Reaganomics destroyed the solid economy that the 1930s FDR New Deal created which allowed the rise of the middle class which we had from the 1940s to the 1980s. We didn’t fully feel the effects of the “Reagan Revolution” until the late 1990s and early 2000s. I personally felt it in the reduced number of projects and tighter budgets. As an aside, this is also the time when music died. Is this related? YES. It also changed attitudes. People have become harsher and more difficult to work with. This shift in attitudes also killed off pleasantries such as thank you notes.
Where do we go from here? Only time will tell.