I had no idea I was in for such an exciting career when I got into broadcast design nearly thirty years ago. I knew I absolutely loved the creative challenges of bringing graphic messages to life. I knew I was working in a wild new frontier. I knew the tools would evolve. I knew the demand would soar. What I didn’t foresee was that the road would get quite so bumpy.
After a wonderful long run, the Y2K/dot bomb flattened my business and the broadcast design industry in general. The sudden drop of demand for broadcast design services meant that there just wasn’t enough work to go around. Numerous companies were pitching for every little piece of work. It was a very tough time.
As the media and entertainment business has recovered from that period, the broadcast design industry has slowly improved. It once again seems fairly stable, although it still has a few chronic problems.
Spec work continues to be a cancer that prevents the broadcast design industry from becoming as healthy as it should be. You may not hear a lot of people complaining about spec out in public because design companies don’t want anyone to see their pain. To maintain market appeal, design companies feels the need to always look and act confident and prosperous — when in fact spec work creates a lot of losers and is a major financial burden on the entire industry. The good news is that the “cancer” seems to be in remission — although we’re still a long way from a clean bill of health.
Perhaps the bigger challenge faced by broadcast design firms is price pressure. Budgets are a fraction of what they were a few short years ago, but client expectations are still very high. Desktop production tools have made it possible to get the work done at much lower costs, but there simply isn’t enough in the budget to do breakthrough design. Low budgets force designers to do what they can turn around quickly and without a lot of creative development. The market seems to be placing more value on economy than on creativity. Things are starting to get a little stale.
I looked at websites and montages for many broadcast design companies to prepare for this article. I was struck by how much similarity I saw.
For whatever reasons, an awful lot of montages from different companies are looking the same. I hesitate to mention the notable exceptions for fear that it will cause others to imitate those reels. Most of the montages I looked at just merged into one big blur. I can’t help but imagine the same thing happens when clients look at reels. Demo montages are always a challenge, but design firms need to practice more thoughtful, purposeful creativity in their preparation.
A greater concern is the similarity of look of the work. 2D graphic images in 3D space are one of the more evident flavors of the moment. I suspect a number of factors are driving this sameness. The first suspect is technology. Everybody is using the same basic tool set so the tools are probably dictating much of the design direction. Design schools may be another factor in driving sameness. As Dan Pappalardo of Troika described it to me, schools seem to be more focused on software training than teaching design. Students are graduating with good technical skills but minimal design ability. The ease of seeing what everyone else is doing via websites may also be contributing to the sameness phenomenon. There is no such thing as an isolated design enclave any more. It’s as easy to see what people are doing on the other side of the world as down the street.
Many design company websites also suffer from great similarity. Change the company name and color palette and it would be pretty easy for a lot of companies to do an even trade on websites — content included. Of course this just makes the good ones really stand out! Bravo to them!
I was also struck by the microscopic type on a number of design company websites. If I was shopping for a company to entrust my graphic communications, I would be very uncomfortable with any firm that did not respect basic readability of written messages. Perhaps these are the same companies responsible for the unreadable credits on many recent TV main titles.
Despite the concerns I’ve expressed, there’s plenty of reason for optimism. Good work continues to happen despite market pressures to the contrary. The tools are getting more powerful and easier to use every day, and designers are learning to get beyond the sameness that happens when technology drives the design. But best of all, the economy has improved to the point where healthy business growth once again promises good things to come.
Billy Pittard is president of PI, a Los Angeles-based consultancy that helps companies with marketing communications, helps companies be more creative, and directs digital media productions. Pittard was formerly founder, co-CEO of Pittard Sullivan, a leading design, branding and marketing communications service for the media and entertainment industry. Pittard can be reached at bpittard@pacbell.net.
