Made you look

Yesterday I had the chance to watch the documentary film Made you look directed by Paul O'Connor and Anthony Peters at the Hyde Park Picture House, so I decided to go and check it out.

The filmmakers interview the top UK Graphic designers, such as Ian Stevenson, Hattie Stewart and the people from important studios like It's Nice That or Print Club London. They all give various but unanimous opinions about how the old methods of design are essential to contemporary design. They claim that computer based design is great, a big step and a very important tool in order to create quickly and with a good level of quality, but the results are not as worthy as old ones used to be.

I enjoyed the film and it gave me the opportunity to discover new and great designers I did not know about. The documentary wanted to prove the importance of crafting and I found it very interesting, since all my designs are computer based.

However, I could not totally agree with all the points exposed. I have always been very bad at crafting, and without a computer I would have never been able to experiment what Graphic Design is. They claim quite often that analog crafting methods have more value than digital ones, and I think that is an opinion that oscillates throughout the time. Nowadays computer based design can be considered banal, but in next generations it will be just another old method and just because of that it will mean that it will not be mainstream and, therefore, better (or more real) than any contemporary one? Only if you think evolution is involution, which I sometimes do, it can make sense. But I strongly believe this is not the case.

I admit that crafting a design has its own magic and is not the same as designing on a computer, but I do not think it is better. They are both very different processes. It reminded me when we presented the alphabet the first days of the course. Someone said: "I chose a crafting design because I thought everyone else was probably going to do a digital design". Well, it is a very respectable decision, which I agree with, as long as you, as designer, are expressing through that crafting what you would like to express. It would be pointless trying to use a different method that does not work for you. But it was certainly not the case. That person did a great job with all that stuff! Even though, I think when speaking about something so subjective as art is, words like better or worse are meaningless and drive the argument to disquisitions instead on focusing on pros and cons of each one of the methods. And I think in most of the artistic fields there are always two main positions: the innovative and the conservative one, and I believe both of them are equally important to have access to.