When I started out as a graphic designer, it was a very different world. Apple was a company surviving mainly due to the pros working in my new profession, no matter how ace OS 7.6 seemed to be. My training was all about learning to create books in Quark Xpress, with the help of Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Photoshop, and how to use SCSI and Imagesetters.

I worked with wonderful 42 year old chain smoking chaps, who were still bemoaning the loss of manual typesetting, and saw PostScript as a dirty word, even though it appeared to me to make their jobs much easier.

They complained that it was duller, less personal, less unique. Everything was automated and replicated.

For many older Mac users, 1984 was the magic year. My personal magic year was 1994.

That was when my company sent me, a spotty 16 year old, on a training course to learn more about data merge marketing. Dull. But something magical happened while I was there & was playing about on one of the Mac 8100's. 

On this wonderful grey box lived Netscape Communicator, and via Netscape Communicator, I discovered the World Wide Web for the first time.

& I was hooked. Transfixed. Sold on the future being here.

The internet in 1994 was a very different World Wide Web from that which now sits in front of us. But I managed to talk my bosses at the time into getting a Mac 8100 and a router and the rest, for me, was history.

Since then, I've been fortunate enough to have worked in both digital and print, the skills learnt in Quark and Freehand being translated into Indesign and Illustrator, as Adobe took over that aspect of publishing, and my web skills transitioning from Art Press to Frontpage to Dreamweaver to Joomla to wonderfully easy Squarespace, all helped along by the wonders of the Mac and 26 years (!) of daily Photoshop worship.

But strangely, somewhere along the way, somewhere around 10 years ago or so, I fell out of love with web design, and found my passion turn to book design, to page layout that resulted in ink on paper. The skills I had originally learnt in Quark Xpress now honed to biblical levels of expertise in Adobe Indesign.

The web? Web design for me in 2020 feels duller, less personal, less unique. It's still about half of my weekly work, and it's 1000 times easier to work in than it was on a Mac running dial up in 1994, but everything feels automated and replicated to me.

I am 42 years old.

I quit the chain smoking this year.