To say I've been in this industry a long time would be an understatement. No, I'm not old. I just started really, really young.
I remember when I started design school in Germany. No fancy computers. Heck, we couldn't even use Rapidiograph pens. We had to mix our own Gauche paint and use flow pens to draw lines.Line after line. Blop after blop of gauche (if you didn't do it right.) And for letters, we couldn't use Letraset. We had to hand draw each letter... those days are gone. But I can't say we are any better off because they are.
Letraset in it's prime. Position, rub, letters!
After the era of "hand doing everything" came the desktop publishing craze. Buy an Apple Classic computer, get a copy of Adobe PageMaker and viola! You are a "desktop publisher." Now you need to take your creation to an output bureau for Linotype or film. Well, it didn't take long for designers to realize that desktop publishing wasn't going to replace them, but it did put an end to the old way of design and now the designer had to do it all. Typesetting. Color correcting. Separations. Output. Everything.
Enter the WWW. As a designer, your world was going to take a drastic turn. Mosaic. Tables. HTML. DeBabalizer. Single Pixel GIF trick. David Siegel. BBEdit. Design and conception took a back seat to code and browser compatibility. But we learned. We adapted. And it seems the print industry didn't suffer or disappear. (The end of Print wasn't.)
NCSA Mosaic. The internet in all of it's glory. Circa 1993.
The Dot Com boom in the late 90's and early 2000's gave rise to a whole new breed of job title. Web Developer. Web Designer. Web Architect. etc... and everyone rushed to put "Web" in their title. True story. At my last place of employment, I couldn't get approval to hire a copywriter. Until I put "web" in front of the word "copywriter." Whatever. It worked.
The pets.com sock puppet was one of the biggest selling items of the now defunct company. The internet gave rise to a whole new industry of jobs and technology, but no one wanted to buy dog food online.
Fast forward to 2014. UX is the new cool. Everyone is rushing to be a UX something or other. UX Designer. UX Architect. UX Fillintheblank. I guess it was inevitable. With companies like Apple and BMW proving that design matters, building great experiences is more important than cutting edge technology. User Experience is now a key differentiator. What good is the new new if you can't USE it?
So what is next? What comes after UX? In "The Designful Company Design," Marty Neumeier posits that design is rapidly spreading from “posters and toasters” to processes, systems, and organizations. Design will not only take over how we think about customers, but how we plan and run our internal organizations. How we structure our business. As Marty says, "if you want to innovate, you have to design."