The Struggle of the Graphic Designers and Social Media

Graphic designers relied heavily on word-of-mouth for their works to become popular and to be seen by the public, it was close to impossible to grow an organic dedicated fanbase to follow your work, nowadays with the rise of the internet and social media, you can create a profile on numerous websites such as Behance, Instagram and Dribble, where not only you can post your 2D images, you can share animations, vlogs and interactive art with no limitations of size file or quality. 

“With a traditional paper portfolio, it is rarely possible to accommodate all our work, with a laptop we can take everything”. On one hand, this supports graphic designers and gives them an easy interaction hub for clients to come in. On the other hand, this displays that having an image and a following is a bigger priority than before, especially since more designer accounts are being created everyday. This may encourage designers to be more active and post more, therefore might have to rush out work or even worse, plagiarise. The struggle of the graphic designers wasn’t explored enough, especially in a competitive aspect.

Away from social media, they explored other programs like, Photoshop, Illustrator, After effect where you can create piece of work faster and more efficiently than the traditional way. Specifically with Adobe After effect, an average person has access to a high amount of tools that helps them create animation in a rapid time compared to classic Disney movies where they had to use traditional stocks cell where they have to draw on every single frame. This determines that technology is giving opportunities to artists to be creative without worrying on buying big equipment or having a big team. Furthermore, it helps to find talent much easier than before, especially after they upload their animation on social media. 

One of the first graphic designers to use technology on their work was April Greiman. She is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European ‘New Wave’ design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s. ‘Greiman was one of the first graphic designers make use of the powerful tools in a computer. He notes that Greiman did not view the computer as simply a functional tool but as something that had led her to experiment in a way that opened up new avenues of design.’ This describes the good side of technology, however it doesn’t showcase the disadvantage of having so much tools and how it could affect the slight mistake of the human touch, moreover it might not challenge the creative mind.

Today we are seeing an uprising against the over digitalised style work. We are seeing a rise in the popularity of traditional print-based media as designers are striving for the type of imperfection that was commonplace before the digital revolution. This can be seen today in many sources. Just one look at designs from today’s creative area gives you the opportunity to see an abundance of textures and overlays used to create the implied use of traditional media.