I am an artistic person.  I am a creative person.  I am NOT an artist, and I am certainly not a designer.

The topic for the day it to know your limits because the logo above proves the value of this concept to me.  I could not create the logo above, and the fact that it pieced together from such obvious yet elusive elements tells me that there is so much to design that I could never understand in my lifetime lest I dedicate myself to becoming a designer.  Our dear friend Sara Tomko gifted us with a new logo for our site “the Fashionable Foodie” and she knocked it out of the park on the first try.

There is something that happened with the advent of pirated copies of photoshop and macromedia flash to enhance the confidence of the unwashed masses.  Every person who had some creative streak suddenly thought that the technological barriers had been lifted and all limitations were rescinded thanks to modern computing.  What has now become so obvious is that it was never technology that was preventing good designers from expressing themselves, it was technology that was keeping the untrained would-be-artists from flooding the world with horrid designs.  

Before the late 80′s, a person inspired with a bad design idea would have to surmount all the technological hurdles to envision, depict and mass produce their inspiration.  As this was not an easy or inexpensive task, would-be designers were met with a very real market barrier that artificially censored the marketplace of design ideas.  Surprisingly, this may have been a good thing, as only the most marketable ideas would be pursued and brought to fruition in an independent or commercial form.  

For those of you old enough to remember the age before desktop publishing, people used to create ‘zines with photocopiers.  The blogs of yesteryear, these ‘zines were generally poorly conceived, executed, and to a fault, short lived.  All that said, there was a certain amount of dedication required to create a photocopier layout and churn out a monthly pamphlet of your retarded opinions.  Those people that kept at it for more then six months were regular media titans in today’s world.  I bring up this quirky bit of history only to point out that when desktop publishing became a default computing tool, the ‘zine died entirely.  When creating a newsletter became a point-and-click operation, the zine was no longer relevant.

What I think I’m getting at is the fact that technological barriers are a good thing for a society.  I don’t mean artifical barriers of jargon and procedure like the american law system, I mean very real barriers of technical expertise.  In the same way that the average person cannot bake a loaf of bread, the insular nature of technical operation can cause some lesser talented people to give up at the first sign of resistance.  Approach a baker and suggest that they make you a roasted garlic loaf and they’ll probably think of a way to comply.  Approach a baker and suggest that they make you a funfetti olive load and you’ll meet the limits of your personal creativity.

Computers have dumbed down tools that would be otherwise confusing for the layman to use.  A printing press is not a simple operation, but the color inkjet printer is about as easy as a microwave.  The chemical darkroom is foreign to a whole new generation of photographers, but a channel mixer adjustment layer in photoshop has become the ubiquitous method for creating a monotone print.  Explain to a young photographer who has never used fixer how multitone filters work and you’ll be met with quizzical stares, yet if you show a traditional chemical photographer how a burn and dodge tool work, they’ll grasp the concept immediately.

These lowering of barriers can make a person like me, with a creative streak and confidence believe that I can create far outside of my abilities.  What is not considered is the actual training involved in the use of these tools.  Design is not like microsoft word.  It is not spellcheck and mail merge.  I could not have created the logo above that Sara created.  I could have spent hours in illustrator, teaching myself how to use the software tool while convincing my eyes that what was being presented was exceptional simply for the fact that I was creating it.  

The message is to set your own limits and be honest with them.  If you sincerely believe that you are able to create something just because of the tools that are available to you, then you probably have no idea what you are creating.