Not enough graphic designers working in television industry
Note: I realize I am supposed to tag my entry, but I am getting the following error:
Client error: Not allowed to add tags to entries in this journal
I have noticed something working in television, and I thought I'd let you guys know.
In television, a large portion of graphic design decisions (graphic elements, font choice, colour combinations) are made by people who are not graphic designers: Chyron operators, directors, editors, and people who work with Photoshop and AfterEffects but who have no formal art education.
I have seen a lot of garbage-looking stuff. I am not a graphic designer either, but I took 3-4 design courses during my fine arts degree and I have a basic sense of what is good design. At work I have seen things like: decorative fonts used for body text, fonts over a background that is too similar in colour, and then with a big glow or drop-shadow to make it readable, logos and fonts arranged on backgrounds without any sense of an overall design idea. I recently saw something done by someone who clearly knows 3D software, but the colour scheme was pretty much the whole rainbow.
Then typically when I read an article directed towards graphic designers, it seems to be about how to avoid doing unpaid work in print and webpage design.
I think that graphic designers, if they are able to, should branch out and learn AfterEffects and Avid editing, and possibly do a ~little~ unpaid learning at a TV station, because there is paid work available, and it is not all going to formally trained graphic designers.
The reason you will have to do your learning at the TV station is because 1) they have graphic and editing equipment that colleges do not have (you could learn Avid & 3D software, but likely not XPression or Deko) 2) individual TV stations will have peculiar ways of doing things. 3) There are things about TV graphics that are used only for TV: eg. being able to create a key signal without a white aliased edge, not having your whites too white or blacks too black.
For example, I went to a college that taught Avid editing and Inscriber CG, but I went on to do a co-op placement at a TV station that had Digital Betacam edit bays and Chyron, later they switched to Deko and Quantel editing. So... college wasn't much help at all, I had to learn on the job!!!
Maybe this is as much a rant about bad design that I see at work, but I see it as an opportunity for graphic designers to move in and make things look better.
Client error: Not allowed to add tags to entries in this journal
I have noticed something working in television, and I thought I'd let you guys know.
In television, a large portion of graphic design decisions (graphic elements, font choice, colour combinations) are made by people who are not graphic designers: Chyron operators, directors, editors, and people who work with Photoshop and AfterEffects but who have no formal art education.
I have seen a lot of garbage-looking stuff. I am not a graphic designer either, but I took 3-4 design courses during my fine arts degree and I have a basic sense of what is good design. At work I have seen things like: decorative fonts used for body text, fonts over a background that is too similar in colour, and then with a big glow or drop-shadow to make it readable, logos and fonts arranged on backgrounds without any sense of an overall design idea. I recently saw something done by someone who clearly knows 3D software, but the colour scheme was pretty much the whole rainbow.
Then typically when I read an article directed towards graphic designers, it seems to be about how to avoid doing unpaid work in print and webpage design.
I think that graphic designers, if they are able to, should branch out and learn AfterEffects and Avid editing, and possibly do a ~little~ unpaid learning at a TV station, because there is paid work available, and it is not all going to formally trained graphic designers.
The reason you will have to do your learning at the TV station is because 1) they have graphic and editing equipment that colleges do not have (you could learn Avid & 3D software, but likely not XPression or Deko) 2) individual TV stations will have peculiar ways of doing things. 3) There are things about TV graphics that are used only for TV: eg. being able to create a key signal without a white aliased edge, not having your whites too white or blacks too black.
For example, I went to a college that taught Avid editing and Inscriber CG, but I went on to do a co-op placement at a TV station that had Digital Betacam edit bays and Chyron, later they switched to Deko and Quantel editing. So... college wasn't much help at all, I had to learn on the job!!!
Maybe this is as much a rant about bad design that I see at work, but I see it as an opportunity for graphic designers to move in and make things look better.