Digicams and the Internet Will Eat Your Job

The advent of the electronic and digital world has unleashed several waves of "creative destruction" on the creative communities across the globe. Perhaps the first to feel the devastating effects of the new technologies were typesetters, who were forced to abandon their metal type casting machines for increasingly sophisticated electronic and digital equipment; by the time I entered art school in 1979 "photolettering" was reasonably well-established and metal type was even by then rapidly disappearing. Unfortunately for typesetters, the changes were only beginning; the invention and development of the desktop computer pioneered by Apple led to "desktop publishing," which was the death knell for the typsetting industry as a whole.

Unfortunately for graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators, it's easy to come to the conclusion that the typesetter's fate awaits us as well. The development of the internet and the high-megapixel digital camera has unleashed another wave of technologically-driven "creative destruction."

As this frankly depressing article in the L.A. Times by James Rainey details, it's not an easy time to be someone working in the commercial realm of the visual arts.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-onthemedia22-2010jan22,0,4822231.column