Design before Dribbble
This text is loosely connected to
’s The Unbearable Homogeneity of Design. What a conversation starter!What was design like before Dribbble?
Here’s what it was like for me, growing up far, far away from the design scene. I’d love to hear what it was like for you. Hit me up in the comments.
Manila, 1989:
At age 14, by chance, I came across ID: Magazine of International Design and was hooked. But that was the only issue I got my hands on.
The local drug store (they sold magazines too) never brought in another issue, so when it came to industrial design, Giugiario’s and Colani’s work was all I would know about for some time.
I found some brown-paper reprints of 1970s books about architectural drafting etc at my local bookstore, and gobbled them up.
But nothing about design methods, nothing about typography, nothing about design history — zilch.
…
On the plus side, if you dig through the history of design methods, even the pros were having a hard time finding the good stuff around this time. Nigel Cross’s 1984 book Developments in Design Methodology was perhaps the first book that offered a reasonable overview of what was happening in design, methods-wise, and Clive Dilnot’s article State of Design History from the same year frets about how the multiple meanings of “design” trips us up. Just like now.
…
Oslo, early 1990s
Once a month I’d trek to the newsstand next to our Parliament building, the only one that sold the German magazine Design Report. There was nothing akin to Graphics International, Graphis, ID or Metropolis on sale, so 120 pages of German, the Swedish magazine Cap & Design which focused on advertising, branding, packaging and graphic design was my dose of inspiration for the next 30 days.
The best local bookstore had maybe 30 books on industrial & communication design (plenty about interior design, architecture and advertising, though), and they were all out-of-reach-expensive. Obviously, the local design school (we only had one) had a decent library, but even getting into the building was tricky.
There were no design meetups and nothing available online, so it was difficult to get a grip on what design was and how it could be learned. I’ll never forget that sense of a void – where can I learn this stuff? – and that’s one of the reasons I’ve helped organize IxDA Oslo for the last ten years.
I went to one (there was only one) amazing recruitment event for Art Center’s now-defunct Swiss branch, taught myself to use QuarkXpress (which cost me $3000 to purchase, ugh) and Illustrator while doing layout and illustration (definitely not design) jobs for advertising agencies, read what I could find and networked with advertising agencies and graphic design companies by working as a courier. But really, there was no easy way to learn about design where I lived, the way millions can do today.
Industrial design school, 1997
Eventually, and after a lot of effort, I was accepted to the industrial design program at AHO in Oslo. The programme was excellent, the facilities top notch (massive 3D printers in 1997, huge SGI workstations, all the software in the world) … but it was still pretty damn hard to get a handle on what was happening in the design world. Sure, you could pop open Netscape, but where would you go?
Our school’s library was well-stocked, but didn’t subscribe to many relevant design magazines, so the rate of new impulses and new ideas ticking in from abroad was low, at best.
I ended up subscribing to many of the good magazines myself. At the time you’d have to send the publisher an envelope with a check to subscribe. If you were smart you’d call them long distance (crazy expensive) and make sure that you’d gotten the correct price and that they were expecting your order, and then wait maybe eight weeks before the magazines started coming. Unfortunately, you’d have to visit your bank and pay a hefty fee to get a check issued in GBP or USD. But that was a small price to pay for a reliable connection to the world of design.
Heck, I’d fly to London just to buy good design books and magazines, and would come back home broke, happy and with 3x my baggage allowance.
In 1997, we were so starved for good design magazines that the launch of the internationalist-surfacist magazine Wallpaper* was received with a thrill I remember well. “Wow! A real design magazine! This is amazing!”. 😳
My little world of design was disconnected from the main, and I suspect that the fields of information architecture and interaction design were not yet connected to industrial and graphic design. Ah, the irony of spending thousands of hours in Alias|Wavefront AutoStudio, with marking menus and shelves, a tool that was efficient and powerful in use, if not immediately learnable, without ever thinking that the whole thing was designed.
Unexpected benefits of being “early”
In the 1990s, the old guard of typography guilds, Letraset, paste-up and reprography cameras was on its way out, and a new breed of designers with Macs and dialup connections was on its way in.
Hardware and software was painfully expensive and it was hard to connect with designers in other countries. But, the field of design was wide open and ripe for change.
We did suffer through annoying detour into CD-ROMs and multimedia, and the dotcom boom was followed by the dotcom bust. And I did find David Carson’s work was confusing as heck: my design education was predicated on an HfG-inspired model of properly-performed analysis leads to properly-designed form, his work for Raygun was … actually I still have no idea what the heck David Carson’s work was about, but now I wax nostalgic for its brutish grunginess.
But from the ashes of the dotcom era ashes sprang Blogger, Flickr, the participatory web, Web 2.0, social media, the democratization of design — and yes, Dribble — but also an escape from that disconnected void.
The many fields and professions of design today can be hard to get a grip on, and yes, it is easy to opine about what’s on Dribbble and no, we still haven’t perfected design education, the transition from school to industry, nor continuing education offerings.
But we are at long last reasonably connected, and I still think that’s an awesome feat.
Oh, and if you’re interested in design beyond the Western canon, I recommend Victor Margolin’s World History of Design encyclopedia.
PS: I’d love to hear what working in design was like for
back in the day.