Remember the heady days of this business? Remember when a new version of your favorite desktop publishing software came out? If you weren’t there in line at midnight, you at least had it bought and installed on one of your machines within the week because, whatever the growing pains, each new version gave you new capabilities.

And man, when they came out with a hard drive with double the space, say 500Mb instead of 250Mb, you were ecstatic to plop down a buck a megabyte because, well, it meant, we could keep three jobs on your hard drives simultaneously instead of just one. And don’t even get me started on the rush when 100Mb Zip drives came out and CD burning became available. I could afford to back up on something besides floppies!

Is it just me, or has the excitement worn off? Not that this is necessarily a bad thing but I think that, in general, the hardware and software has caught up with the needs of print and web publishers. Maybe I’ll eventually look as foolish as the idiot who wrote a book about “the end of history” after the fall of the Soviet Union but I don’t think we’re on the bleeding edge anymore. The bleeding edge, that area of software and hardware development is still out there for multimedia developers and especially game developers but not so much for print designers. 

In reality, almost all of my hardware upgrades recently were forced by my forays into video editing not anything to do with standard or web publishing. That is not to say that technological changes won’t keep making our lives easier in Desktop Publishing but that’s going to be more in the realm of refinements and more convenient automations rather than in revolutions. The difference between Photoshop CS2 and Photoshop CS3 is way less than the difference between Photoshop 3 and 4. And the difference between a 200Mb and 500Mb in a hard drive is far more substantial than the difference between 60Gb and 600Gb.

It is true that I may have a warped  perspective because I am not now and never really ever have been doing cutting edge design. For me, I found unique career opportunities along the edges where design and technology meet. I might not be the most creative designer but I could make designs that could work well in whatever the current technology was and I could take the work of more creative designers and bring them back to reality. But most of those opportunities have dried up. There’s no long a need for people who can get files across platform because they already do that without any skilled intervention. I don’t have to find ways to optimize humongous print files so they had a prayer of being ripped because, well, the new technology can handle files that are more humongouser than anything you can create without really consciously trying to choke your equipment.

I’m not lamenting any of this, just noting a change in the landscape that happened when I wasn’t looking. What got me thinking about this is the realization that I’m now two versions back in Corel Draw, have an uninstalled copy of Vista gathering dust and can’t yet find any features in CS3 that make me want to spend hundreds of dollars for the upgrade when I can’t think of anything these updates will do for me that I really, absolutely need for the work I’m doing now.

So now that the history of Desktop Publishing is over, I can save up for that motorcycle…