How Graphic Designers Can Still Find Work in the Physical Media Landscape
The media landscape has changed, even when I personally don’t see it as a big change. So digital media is here and is rapidly becoming the center of all media related business and companies. I even wrote an entirely separate blog on this very topic of physical media vs digital media. No longer do a majority of them rely on the physical media landscape to be relevant in the industries they occupy, except for the stores people go to for those products. Even that is getting innovated with stores having their own websites all to compete with the biggest online store in Amazon.
Options In Physical Media Jobs
Even when Amazon became big, stores still have business because Amazon can’t do everything. One of its shortcomings is the inability to do groceries, which is the biggest reason that grocery stores like Stop N Shop and Price Rite and pharmacies like Walgreens and Rite Aid still exist. Aside from those stores needing designers for advertising, promotional material and other misc. designs for those stores, they also have websites or apps just for the easier access to the stock of the stores and being able to make purchases remotely then drop in to pick up said order.
Now grocery and drug stores aren’t the only ones who stay an outlier from most digital media, as bookstores have mostly kept themselves in business. Now, since I know the US, I can only speak for Barnes & Noble and the one that went out of business in my childhood, Borders. In fact, I only found this out recently, but Borders when it filed for bankruptcy, moved all its customer assets to Barnes & Noble, which makes sense considering they were in competition for the same thing, being a bookstore.
On the topic of books, the biggest form of physical media that still exists is printed books. There is just something so relaxing about holding a physical book and reading on paper, not on a screen. However, not all books are staying physical, as some series are becoming online exclusive, which doesn’t help people who can’t afford a Kindle, Amazon Fire, or other device that can read e-books. After all, printed media has become so cheap nowadays that a regular novel barely costs $15, which is reasonable for a lot of people who want a quick read.
“The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it’s very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes”
In fact, some authors will still advocate that the book as a concept is not dying out, yet they are always being innovated in how they are sold and the methods they use to sell. This is where Graphic Designers come in. You see, it’s not just the authors, editors and publishers (even as publishing becomes integrated into other occupations) that make a book. Depending on the genre, illustrators and designers are key to a book’s published success. If the content is children’s books, then an illustrator is definitely needed for the vibrant book covers and any images that go inside the book, while novels for teenagers may have illustrations, but only in black and white as they become needed for the sake of visualizing a scene. In short, printed books would not do half as well if not for the designers who make the covers and illustrators that give images where needed.
Unfortunately, books have the drawback of not being able to easily fix writing or factual errors once they leave the author and editor and they are becoming more expensive to manufacture, so it makes sense some novels are skipping the physical option entirely.
Other Physical Media
Books aren’t the only physical media that Graphic Designers can find work in. Physical media also includes CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, Cassettes and vinyl records. All these forms of media are physical in production and designers help with the illustrations that make up their core advertising. They make the covers for said media cases, and the layouts for their back covers going into detail what the media contains. In fact, the only place these are found online for design purposes are freelance websites who make custom cases for DVDs and CDs, like National Media Services, Disk Makers, and Sienna Digital just to name a few.
To round off this discussion of physical media, I’ll bring up the final pieces of physical media that do still exist even if on a very downsized scale compared to before digital. I’m referring to physical advertisements and editorials like newspapers, journals, magazines and billboard signs. Graphic Designers all play a role in how these are made, especially the content placement and layout design of those printed media.
I’ll single out magazines as they are the one out of my list that still has a presence in physical media when most of the others have been converted to the digital landscape (yes even billboards are electronic now).
“A magazine designer is a creative professional who handles a magazine’s visual layout. They use a variety of artwork, like photos and graphics, to create the design for magazine pages and covers. Magazine designers have to fully understand their publication’s audience, which helps them create layouts that attract more readership than their competitors”
Well as I did research on magazine designers, I noticed some of the requirements for the position being computer skills and honestly, I don’t blame them. In an era where we have the advantage of digital software, it becomes more efficient to prototype the bulk of the work online then print it all out and deliver the finished product to stores. However, the job still deals with the finished product being physical, so the designers have to understand the work, the audience, and the way images and type interact on the pages.
To wrap this up, I made a lengthy discussion on how physical media won’t die out to the emergence of digital media. I mean, even vinyl records are making a comeback simply because of the way music is treated online these days, so I say there is hope in physical media still surviving and it only will if people are willing to work for those types of media.
Hello, I am Joseph Crickmore.
But you can call me Joey. I love art and design, and anything else that can be created with my own hands. I have a younger brother who has an autistic disorder, so I always show my support on World Autism Awareness Day.
I myself am a designer, content creator, and freelance artist for commissions.
