David Leicester Hardy - Introduction to Digital Media Design: Transferable hacks, skills and tricks

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First published in Great Britain 2022

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1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

Cover illustration Jason Anscombe

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ISBN: 978-1-3501-0493-8 (PB)
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COMPANION WEBSITE

The companion website features exercises, sample files and templates, videos, and complementary material to extend what you learn in the book. Check it out at: introdigitaldesign.com

For my wife Molly, and my daughters Juniper and Beatrix, who allowed
me many an evening to devote to this text. With many thanks to Aaris Sherin,
Robin Landa, and Dan Wong of Design Incubation, for helping me to fully realize
this concept and move forward with it. And with gratitude to my editor,
Leafy Cummins, whose patience saw me through to the end.

Contents

Imagine what a graphic designer from the 1960s would feel like if they stepped into a contemporary studio. Most of us cant because weve grown up with technology. In the space of twenty years, weve gone from tactile compositions to a completely digital ecosystem. The digital shift of the early 1990s empowered designers to produce richly layered compositions in a fraction of the time. Layouts that took days to build by hand could be knocked out in an afternoon with a Macintosh computer. This, no doubt, empowered designers to create the lush, densely packed compositions that defined that era. Computers became sleeker, hard drives smaller and more affordable, and monitors grew larger and much crisper. Yet, the thing that had largely stayed the same since the 1950s was the scope of work and medium of output: printed matter. Graphic designers applied their craft using type, color, form, and a set of principles that had remained unchanged for nearly a half century.