Talkin' 'bout My Generation... in Design
On February 13th, Creative Bloq published an interview with Mark Bonner titled "Why You Need to be Part of the New Breed of 21st Century Creatives," an opinion article on where the design industry is going, why and how it’s going there, and what designers will need to thrive in the evolution.
Bonner argues that now and in the coming years, the one-stop-shop a
gency will die because clients now look for agencies that provide them with strategic, conceptual, graphic, campaign, social, digital, and environmental solutions to their campaigns that will run across all possible media outlets to gain traction. Today’s clients are no longer interested in going to 5 different agencies to run different aspects of a single campaign. Technology has enabled us to expand our skills in website design, app design, video production and audio editing, but because of this, designers/agencies are now expected to know and handle all of these facets. Our generation of this industry is, and must continue to be, more technologically chameleonic than the designers before us.
In a class last semester with the Dr. Matthew Cecil, head of the Elliot School of Communications, he commented that he was excited to see how our generation will revolutionize the communications industry. He said that older generations are quick to condemn new generations; marking them as failures because they do not communicate the way the previous generation did, when in fact, the new generation will thrive because they have and will adapt to the changes of the industry. In my generation’s case, our “short attention span" (need to flit between 4 different entertainment sources simultaneously) allows us to learn many new things at the same time, and we are arguably better at multitasking than any generation before us. They say you can’t multitask and produce the same quality that you would if you focused on just one thing, but in the coming years, we will have to, and my generation will do it best.
