The work you did in your first years wasn’t design and everybody in the studio knew it. You resized other people’s layouts, you set price lists, you built the deck for somebody else’s meeting, and you redrew a logo from a photograph of a logo because a photograph of a logo was all the client had. Then you went home and did your own work, which was better, and which nobody paid for.
That production tier is going first and going fastest, and I doubt anybody in your trade will argue with me about it. My claim is narrower and less comfortable. Those jobs were the whole training scheme. There has never been another one, and nothing that is arriving now does what they did.
Start with type, because it is the clearest case. You set a headline, somebody senior looked at it for about a second, said it was loose, and walked off. You fixed it, or you thought you fixed it, and they said it again. This happened on jobs where the headline didn’t matter, week after week, until the day you saw it yourself before anybody told you. None of that arrived as a rule, because there isn’t one to arrive. What you were building was a threshold for wrongness, and a threshold only calibrates against attempts you made yourself and cared about.
Then production, which designers outside the trade forget and designers inside it never do. A file comes back from a printer with the type filled in, or a color that was gorgeous on screen turns to mud on uncoated stock, or a laminate eats the finish somebody sold to the client. You find out about bleed by not leaving any. You learn what a printer will phone you about by being phoned. All of that knowledge came from small jobs, because a small job is where you are allowed to be the reason something went wrong.
And then the clients. Somebody says make it pop, and every designer alive has heard that sentence and winced. What it usually means is that they can’t tell where to look first, which is a real problem and a fair complaint, and their proposed fix is wrong because fixing it is not their job. You learn that translation by getting it wrong. You do the obvious thing, you make everything louder, the client is still unhappy and can’t say why, and eventually you work out that the answer was to take something away. Nobody teaches that in an afternoon. You learn it on a leaflet nobody kept.
Set that against what a junior gets offered instead. Options, at speed, in quantity, on demand. And this is where I think the substitution fails, because being handed a screen of things you didn’t make isn’t repetition. It is browsing. The old loop had you commit to a choice, defend it out loud, and find out you were wrong about something you actually believed. That is what a crit is for, and it needs a piece of work you own. Pick one of forty and you have expressed a preference, and you can be made to defend that too. I think that is a thinner kind of being wrong than the one you get from having made the thing yourself. I’m guessing at the size of the gap, though, and an art director who trains people for a living might tell me there isn’t one.
The awkward part sits right there. Directing one of these tools well takes exactly the eye that the old jobs built. You have to look at four passable images and know that the third is closest, and that the type is off, and that the whole set is solving the wrong problem. That is evaluation, and evaluation was never free. It came from years of making the bad version yourself. So the tool works best in the hands of people who are already good, which is a lovely arrangement for them and a closed door for everybody behind them.
There is an economic version of this that studios will discover the hard way. Juniors were never charity. They were profitable, because production hours billed and cost little, and the training happened inside work that was already paying its way. Nobody sat down and decided to run a school. Take away the billable production and the junior stops being a small profit with a lesson attached and becomes a straight cost with a promise attached. Studios are not sentimental about costs and never have been.
Art direction is a taught craft, and none of the teaching has ever needed equipment. People are trained in it on purpose, by looking hard at work they did not make, saying what is wrong with it and why, and being told they are wrong about that. If an eye can be built that way, then a junior with forty options and a good director at their shoulder is not starved of anything. They are in a tighter loop than you ever had, with more attempts in a week than you used to get in a season.
My answer, and you can weigh it against your own years, is that the loop which taught you had a client in it. Somebody outside the studio was unhappy, or the printer rang, or the thing went out into the world and was wrong in a way nobody in the room had predicted. A director’s verdict arrives before the work has met anybody, and it is one person’s. I don’t think the tighter loop replaces that, and I can’t prove it either. Nobody has run that experiment long enough to know, because everybody teaching it now learned the old way.
Replacing the loop deliberately would mean studios funding work that earns nothing so that somebody learns to see, and that is exactly the sort of spending that dies the first time a year goes badly. A few good places will do it, mostly because one stubborn person insists. Most won’t, and will complain later about the standard of the people applying to them, and will not put the two things together.
Look at the smallest job in the studio this week, the one nobody wants and nobody will ever see. Before you feed it to anything, hand it to whoever joined most recently, and let them carry it all the way out to the printer with their own name on it. It will cost you an afternoon and a slice of the margin. Nobody is going to make you do that, and nothing in the way a studio gets run will ever suggest it.
