ABSTRACT
To understand the future of graphic communication, it is useful to think first about the past: to understand why designers did what they did in the past. Designers are often so close to the means of production that they begin to think that the way that they do things is both natural and right, when it is nothing of the sort. Strangely enough, this confusion applies equally to those who love the graphic media of the past and those who love the media of the future. Many designers (and quite a few design educators) talk about craft in ways that venerate it, commenting, ‘Isn’t it a shame that the craft of this or that medium is being lost to the current generation of designers?’ (‘because’, they say, ‘there is clearly a purity in hand-printed letterpress that well-set type made in InDesign or Quark cannot supply’). 1 For these folk, everything is shiny in the rear-view mirror; they live in a world of rediscovered glory, of work made better by seeming to be old. Work of the past, for these people, is always better than work of the now or the future.
