Gen X creative doom? Nothing to see here.
by Deacon Webster
There was a piece in The New York Times this weekend bemoaning the state of affairs for Gen Xers in creative fields. Creative industries have been upended at a moment when Gen X is supposed to be at the top of its game and finally running the show. Instead, they’re unsure of what’s next. The creative mainstays, magazines, movies, ad agencies, records, “they ain’t what they used to be,” says the Styles section.
I’ve seen a lot of commentary on this article (I’m Gen X and happen to believe that Gen X is actually The Greatest Generation), and to those who see it as a harbinger of doom I say this: it could’ve been published any day over the past 30 years and felt just as relevant as it does right now. There is nothing to see here.
In my first job in advertising, every single idea we presented was drawn by hand. Pens, knives, glue, and tape. To be an art director you had to be able to draw and craft. There were also “comp artists” who did this one thing for a living.
Stock photography came in a bound book. You had to find what you liked in the book, look up the corresponding number, and order the image. If you wanted to mess with the image, you had to photocopy it, cut it out, and draw around it (in black and white).
Back then, Wired magazine was perfect bound and thick. It was the guide to the digital age. People used to collect them. We were working with Wired when Condé Nast bought it, and didn’t see the need to also purchase the “wired.com” domain. Conde Nast ran magazines, not websites.
Later, we used to do our layouts in a program called Quark. There were people who were masterful with that program. You could be a Quark mechanical artist. That was a job.
Flash animation was a major ad agency competency for a while. We had a bunch of people working for us who were Flash animators. At some point, Adobe sunsetted it, and everyone rushed to learn HTML5 …
When we first started Walrus, Facebook apps were the rage. There were production companies that specialized in making Facebook apps that could plug into the platform and do entertaining things.
Remember Vine? There were Vine influencers. That was a job.
We once had an idea for a voice application that would run on Alexa and Google Home. The developers who specialized in voice apps and had a nine month backlog of work wanted to charge us $250k to make it.
Final Cut Pro used to be a viable alternative to Avid. If you were a contrarian, you used Macromedia Director.
If you think your job is about tools and process, I can see why you’d be scared. But if you come at it from a more open-minded place, this is an exciting time.
Steven Soderbergh has shot multiple feature films on an iPhone.
Billie Eilish’s first album was recorded in her house on a Mac.
The Mandalorian is shot in a 360-degree LED film volume that can make it look like any location, including deep space.
Today, if you have an idea for anything visual, you can open up any number of applications and see what it looks like instantly.
There are classic business cases where companies misunderstood what they actually sold, and failed to thrive. Kodak thought they were in the film business. Blockbuster thought they were in the VHS rental business. Don’t get caught in this trap. Ad agencies, much as they wish they were, are not in the 30 second commercial business.
Today, there is very little friction between ideas and distribution. For better or worse, people are spending a bajillion hours on their phones every day. If you’re a professional creative person, your job is to find a way to peel off a few minutes. That’s it. “How” is the fun part.
At the end of The Martian, Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, has a great quote about surviving in the highly inhospitable environment on Mars:
“At some point everything’s gonna go south on you, and you’re gonna say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem, and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”
If ever there was a quote that sums up Gen X, it’s that one. Get to work.
