So, a little background over what’s happened in the past five years. The design industry has fractured under the crushing weight of declining print sales (across ALL traditional print industries), the shift of our economy to a more “app-centric” and download-able world. Magazines and newspapers, once the a safe haven for designers, oftentimes in unionized roles with guarantees about pay and tenure, have seen their sales decline and have struggled to figure out their place in the modern media landscape of iPads, iPhones, and Androids.

Big companies like Adobe are sitting on cash and are buying up companies left and right in attempts to modernize. They have had varying degrees of success trying to create bridge products that allow “traditional” designers to publish to these new forms of media. They have failed abysmally in the Flash space as Apple, with its juggernaut-like power, has told Flash to go sit out on the bench with Beta-max.

Where things are showing some promise, however, are in areas like the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. These types of software are designed to provide traditional designers with the means to get their work onto iPads and other touch devices. I can’t really comment on the success or failure of this line because it’s simply too new. Think about that for a while. When was the last time Adobe created a *completely new* product line in response to a changing media landscape that they had no control over?

The designer is left at the crossroads of all these diverging and converging paths. I’ve met many older designers who are now trying to reinvent their careers in order to stay relevant. I’ve also met many young designers who feel like they were never taught the proper skills to be truly competitive in this often confusing job landscape.

Here Are Common questions asked by the “Future Designer”
“I’m applying for a job at a Print Media Corp, but they’re looking for someone who has experience with xHTML and CSS. I don’t know any of that!”

“I signed up with a recruiting agency, but they don’t have any jobs for traditional print designers! What am I supposed to do?”

“I’ve sent my resume and portfolio out to all of the dreams studios that I want to work at, but I’ve heard nothing back. What should I do?”

“Every job posting I see is looking for ‘senior level this or that’ with 5+ years experience, and I’m just out of school.”

How do we answer these questions? Let’s find out.

The Print and New Media Device Convergence

As I mentioned before, the traditional players in design software industry are trying to reinvent themselves to grab market share in the mobile space. Modern print design applications, such as InDesign, are attempting to modernize their functionality to better accommodate touch OSes and web. There are publishers who have simply massive stakes in the success of these applications.

This is because it’s the intention of publishers like Condé Nast to bring the same quality of design — typography, layout, design, and all, to their “apps”. In order to truly execute this vision,  these companies need software engineers with a higher level of sensitivity to design and layout. This is something that, unfortunately, most engineers are incapable of grasping. It’s like asking a weapons engineer create an expressionist painting. It simply doesn’t work. This is an opportunity for the designers to seize market share.

At Condé Nast’s Wired Magazine, designers are doing just that. The print designers are on the same design team as the mobile designers. They are expected to work hand in hand. Typography is just as important to Wired Magazine’s iPad app as it is to its magazine. In fact, designers who know print layout and print design theory are successfully making the transition from one type of media and back again. The challenge is that the formats are different.

Here is a great article by iA about how typographic treatments vary from format to format: http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/wired-on-ipad-just-like-a-paper-tiger/

At News Corp (put aside what you may think of them for now), we had the privilege of hiring Jonathan Hoefler as a creative consultant to help build The Daily. His influence is felt throughout the typographic decisions made in The Daily iPad app. More recently, Hoefler was quoted at AIGA’s Pivot 2011 conference that his foundry would be focusing heavily on mobile oriented fonts: “Our goal with web fonts is not to replicate print, but to provide designers with tools of equal quality”

This is a significant shift in the foundry’s direction — one that has been made by necessity. My question is, what does this direction mean for the study of typography and layout?

Here is a study of typography in The Daily. http://fontsinuse.com/the-daily/

Other studios that have made this jump are FontFont. Known for their quite nice traditional fonts, the foundry launched an entirely new branch specifically for the mobile web. Find them here: http://www.mobilefontfonts.com/. We are using these fonts in many of our new applications at Dow Jones. I’m pushing my designers in all sorts of directions in order to properly integrate these new specifically cut for mobile fonts. Having good typography improves the customer’s reading experience. Smart designers know how to pull it off right.

There are other technologies that have enabled designers to have superior control over how web site layouts are rendered in modern browsers. There are now entire web sites dedicated to the art of web typography: https://typekit.com/, and the infinite layout combinations that can be achieved through HTML and CSS: http://www.csszengarden.com.

These examples are all based upon a core foundation of HTML that will never change. I wrote my first line of HTML in 1995, and, to be completely honest, the language has not changed much. What has changed are the methods of styling elements on the screen.

Scripting versus HTML5 and CSS3. Some Things Will Never Change
As I mentioned before, I’ve been doing this for quite some time. I started out professionally in the design industry in 1999. Yes, I was very young. What I was doing back then was writing interactive user interfaces for promotional CD-ROMs that were sent via the mail to various customers for (Insert Company Name Here).

We were designing the interfaces in Photoshop, cutting them up, and coding them up in a script called Lingo that was natively used by Macromedia Director. At the time, this stuff was cutting edge. The problem was that it didn’t scale and didn’t migrate to other platforms. As a result, Director and the Lingo scripting language died a very long, drawn out death.

Now, some 12 years later, I no longer code things in Lingo. It is a dead language, and learning it was a waste of time. I do, however, still use Photoshop to design interfaces.

Fast forward 10 years from 1999 to 2009. Technology changed A LOT in that time. In 2008, everyone wanted an iPhone app. In 2009, everyone wanted an Android App. In 2010, everyone wanted an iPad app. Now, in 2011, people are scratching their heads and wondering… “Hmm. It seems like all these different ‘app’ things are sucking up all sorts of development resources and are actually quite costly. If I have a dollar to spend, where should I spend it?”

These same people (Usually VPs of product, etc.) have learned from the mistakes of Lingo and Actionscript and are hoping to build vast swaths of their web presences in much more scalable non-device dependent ways.  This has spawned a buzzword called “Adaptive Design”, which, in short, dictates that a web site should be coded once. Then, through smart code structure and device specific CSS stylesheets, visitors to a web site can have a great experience regardless of what device they’re using.

It’s because of this shift in thinking about the web’s interaction with mobile devices, taken into account the personal experiences I’ve had in the web field over the past decade, that I would like to throw my hat in the ring and say that all designers should know the basic tenets HTML5 and CSS3 coding languages in order to be truly competitive in the marketplace.

This coding method has been adopted en masse by every single device manufacturer, including Apple, who in addition to promoting the development of their own native apps, has evangelized the virtues of Webkit (An HTML5/CSS3 variant). The language is universally understood to be a valid way to have excellent design practices across devices. In fact, it was Apple’s adoption of Webkit that killed Flash (another scripting language). Read all about it here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/steve_jobs_wins_adobe_to_give_up_mobile_flash_for.php

This does not mean that Future Designers have to have complete mastery coding in HTML5 and CSS3. What I’m saying is that they should know of its capabilities and why it’s important, taking into consideration all the things that I’ve mentioned here.

My own team has a dedicated group of front end developers who handle all the truly complex scripting and xHTML/CSS execution. That being said, I fully expect my designers to know what the technology is capable of so they can accurately convey their designs to the technologists who are building out our web sites.

However, many companies do not have this luxury. Many hiring managers are looking for designers who can design, code HTML and CSS, and maybe even do some scripting in PHP here and there. It must be up to the student to choose how far they want to take their studies of these particular skills.

How do we teach this stuff to designers? As a start, I could make a pretty honest argument that the <DIV> box model that drives HTML5 and CSS3 is VERY similar to the box model that exists in Quark and InDesign. CSS3 provides very cool new stylistic effects to text and allows for designers to have much better control over their typography. It is metaphorically like InDesign’s character and paragraph styles. Even leading can be adjusted using CSS… (and so on and so forth)

Technology for Web Presences
It is indeed possible for designers without any web design experience to have compelling web presences. Web sites like Virb and Cargo Collective have made it pretty easy to set up a web site with next to no technical expertise. WordPress is also an entirely viable solution for many designers seeking to make portfolio sites.

The challenge with all these options lies in the fact that you need to know HTML and CSS to truly customize these web desigsn. For many students, just the default themes will work. But for many designers, they’ll want to have more control.

Additionally, picky employers will be able to pick out the default templated WordPress sites like a sore thumb. They want to see creativity, and, in some cases, they want to see how well you can design AND code CSS. They’ll actually look at your source code!

WordPress is actually a pretty complex system too, and it’s capable of a lot of things that most designers probably don’t need or can’t entirely grasp. I could go on for days about wordpress specifically, but I won’t here.

Conclusion
Modern designers are faced with a plethora of new challenges. The roles that they have to fill are varied and incredibly undefined. The marketplace favors more experienced designers over new ones because employers are afraid to spend money on people who have less experience.

As a result, In order to maintain a competitive advantage in the workplace post graduation, modern designers must have a working knowledge of the design principals around new media devices. This encompasses web typography and layout, and, even better, the ability to code some things themselves on some basic level.

Additionally, designers portfolios should contain studies of these new media types to show that they know how to work with them. Potential employers will be willing to look past a lack of experience if a student has really well realized portfolio of real world problem solving, particularly if that thinking takes place on a mobile device.