Michael Beirut has an article on the NY Times about his transformation from designing manually to the instant soup approach, aka the brilliant softwares.

“If you worked in a design studio in 1980, you were surrounded by colored paper, rubber cement, X-Acto knives and cans of aerosol spray glue. Our work, whether an annual report or a poster, was done by hand.”

But that was in 1980.

In 2003, during the first couple of years at the art department at JU, we were forced to use manual tools because our tutors believed that that is how a student should learn design. I would spend hours printing letters, cutting them out with an X-Acto knife, only to fill them in again with markers, stencil style. I’d bend over plans trying to make them look good when I knew it only took a mouse click. Typically, with my attention span of 0 seconds, everything turned out haphazard. Case in point, the following business card I did for my first ever design course:

As you can see, everything is basically falling off. I eventually got bored and quit the stencils and just wrote everything down with a regular pen.

Then I realized that the best way to deal with projects those years was to do the designing using software, print everything out, cut all the shapes, then glue everything back together. That trick always worked.  Case in hand, another project done in the first year, with every little element glued seperately:

In hindsight, I think that a manual 2-years was a ridiculous decision. It mostly wasted 72-hours worth of courses for those who did manage to catch-up on learning the software in the two years that followed, and screwed the careers of those who graduated with Photoshop filters as the best tricks up their sleeves.

But JU is an archiac university, and most of the tutors, if not archiac themselves, follow the teaching techniques of their own archiac tutors.

And so the 80′s training-style goes on.

He seals off the article with: “Still, I wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process: the deliberation that comes with a slower pace, the attention to detail required when mistakes can’t be undone with the click of a mouse. Younger designers hearing me talk this way react as if I’m getting sentimental about the days when we all used to churn our own butter. Not
wanting to be dismissed as a Luddite, I keep quiet about these things. Still, I keep one old tool at my desk: my T square. I use it to scratch my back.”

We do not have a single T-Square lying at the office. At JU though, we used to use them in sword fights.