Industrial age comes to the digital age?

Written in Feb 08 by Anthony Stonehouse Tags: , ,

Some really nice online campaign work for Bjorn Borg and Jockey has recently been launched. Advertising that features humour in this was always seems to work well.

Large file sizes requiring high speed internet connections are becoming increasingly acceptable, which means a lot more video is finding it’s way online. This allows a strong narrative to be developed and an end user experience that can be much more engaging. At the same time, it’s interesting to note how this is affecting the design and production of online work. A few years ago a small agency had the ability to produce online work with a small team of designers. Today online work requires a lot more specialists such as video producers, motion graphics designers, interface designers, information architecture experts and flash developers etc. Something only a large agency can afford to have on a permanent basis, means smaller agencies need to hire freelancers and therefore increase their production costs.

In some ways this is almost like the rise of the industrial age, (though perhaps not as dramatic!) where the craftsman, who once was responsible for the whole design process from planning to production suddenly found factories and machines could produce their designs quicker and cheaper, but also meant they lost responsibility for the quality of production. So while there is an opportunity to create much better, and more engaging work, having more people involved also opens up more possibilities for things to go wrong and in the end for the final product to suffer.

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