Creative, words, websites, graphic, portfolio, stories.
These are the words that swam in my head for who knows how long. To put it simply, I’m fairly obsessed about art, design, writing, data, anything creative that I can do. In everything, I look for tools that enable me to make things that not only give me creative experiential value through the process of making them, but also the functional value of that permanent end deliverable that I could tell a story with (Babin and Harris, 2018).
Since I was five, I was sketching and drawing on anything I could get my hands on. As I grew up, I picked up more and more mediums like bees to a flower: acrylic painting, watercolor, colored pencil, and even Chinese ink painting. Instead of playing with dollhouses and running around in the playground, I wanted to read books and talked about how much I wanted to be the one making books - write the story, design the drawings, and all, cover to cover. I thought constantly about my “audience”, the needs and wants of the people viewing the things that I did (since artists often hold the same mindset towards their viewers as marketers do to their consumers in the Consumer Value Framework!) (Babin and Harris, 2018), and how I could twist the reality of what I saw in my head and transfer onto paper something new that was raw and not existent before.
My fascination with digital design started when I was 12. Back then, tagging along with my dad to go grocery shopping was still entertaining. On one Saturday trip I saw at the local Costco an old Adobe Photoshop & Premiere (video-editing) Elements 9 software. Boxed in pale blue and purple, I begged my dad to buy it for me. From there, I went home, installed it, and was obsessed. This first package of initial photo and video editing led into other forays from then on and still now: animation through Flash and Adobe Firework, UX design through Wix and Wordpress, publication of books through Adobe InDesign, you name it. Everything under the sun for digital design became an immersion of mediums that I absorbed like water, and am still swimming happily in.
The umbrella industry of all of this software is officially deemed as Design, Editing, & Rendering Software Publishing. It encompasses software for design, picture-editing, video-rendering, object-rendering, and audio-editing. The industry caters to mainly the fields of graphic design, architecture, video game development, manufacturing, and media production (Cook, 2018). Many of these companies’ have softwares that make up the tools companies use for B2B and B2C marketing.
Thinking back to when I first saw the Adobe Elements package in Costco I remember the packaging, out of the 4Ps in marketing ("4 Ps of Marketing and Retail Packaging"), was honestly insignificant. To the unsuspectingly ordinary eye, it would’ve registered as no more than another complicated software, because it is designed with terminology and pictures familiar only to those previously versed in the area. This is because by and large, digital design is a niche area of the greater tech industry. Like the rest of tech, it is also extremely high involvement. Pricing, a second P, is a hefty investment (for example, Adobe’s main product collection of 20+ apps, Creative Cloud, is $52 per month), so the need for cognition (Babin and Harris, 2018) is high. For the investment to be worth it monetarily, you have to be a committed designer. To use the product itself to its greatest extent, a great deal of time, effort, and attention to detail, and aesthetic sense is needed. That high learning curve also breeds an in-group whom are specifically versed in the jargon of “layers”, “filtering”, “liquifying”, and “rasterizing” to discuss how to get the best possible design result.
This industry’s top players are Adobe Inc, Autodesk Inc, and Dassault Systemes (Cook, 2018). Me specifically, I love working with any and all softwares - but I hold a particularly high relationship quality (Babin and Harris, 2018) with Adobe because not only was their Photoshop products my very first, and quite frankly world-turning (to someone like me who’d until then been immersed in traditional arts as an out-group individual since I could walk and talk), exposure to digital design, they are the overwhelming industry leader with over 41.6% of the market share as of December 2018 (Cook, 2018).
I’ve freelanced graphic design work for university organizations and companies since high school. In particular, I’m a publisher - Blueprint is my university literary magazine, one of the creative outlets I have on this campus. We conduct marketing and advertising to get creative submissions from faculty and students all across campus, and then build in Adobe InDesign a publication from scratch to sell every year (click on the "Projects Tab" at the top of this page to see the latest issues and my other projects).
Every time I have a project, my first choice of purchase is more often than not an Adobe product. And as you can see in the picture below, there are tons to choose from for whatever designing project I have. By and large, Adobe and many of its other competitors are differentiated marketers (Babin and Harris, 2018). They serve multiple market segments, each with unique product offerings. Their products, which include not only the universally known Photoshop (the term spread so ubiquitously that it’s become word-of-mouth and a trademark), but also the main product line of Creative Cloud, and other softwares under digital marketing, digital media, and print and publishing ("Adobe Creative Cloud"), are any designer’s dream and necessity to own.
("Adobe Creative Cloud")
There are a million and one ways to be creative. How technology is revamping design, among all the other ways it’s shifting our lives, is the way I’m most excited for because it’s giving me, other designers, and whole businesses, a million and one more.
Word Count: 984
Sources of Value Add: Photoshop/Premiere Elements 9 software package picture, personal artwork, prototype views of personal publication works, links to full publications, graphic design flyers, and Adobe software product offerings
Works Cited
4 Ps of Marketing and Retail Packaging. (n.d.). Retrieved February 25, 2019, from http://www.menasha.com/News-Events/Blog/4-Ps-of-Marketing-and-Retail-Packaging
Adobe Creative Cloud. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html
Babin, B. J., & Harris, E. G. (2018). Consumer Behavior (8th ed.). Boston: Cengage Learning.
Cook, D. (2018, December). Design, Editing & Rendering Software Publishing in the US. IBISWorld Industry Report 51121D. Retrieved from IBISWorld database.