The Old Clock

Before we talk about what changed, let's be honest about what the old way really looked like. Not the romanticized version. The real one.

A typical project in the 1990s went something like this. A client calls. They need a logo, a brochure, and some product photography. Here's the timeline:

Week one: Meet with the client. Take notes on a legal pad. Drive back to the studio. Start researching — which meant flipping through design annuals, checking out competitors' materials that you'd collected in a file folder, maybe going to the library. Begin sketching concepts. By hand.

Week two: Refine sketches. Start building concepts on the computer. In the early days, that meant working with software that crashed constantly on machines that were painfully slow. Render a page? Go get coffee. A long coffee. Print proofs on a laser printer that cost more than a car.

Week three: Present concepts to the client. In person, because email either didn't exist yet or nobody trusted it for anything important. Get feedback. Drive back. Make revisions.

Week four: Photography. Load film. Set up lights. Shoot the products. Hope. Send film to the lab. Wait.

Week five: Film comes back. Select the best frames. Get drum scans made — because scanning was its own specialty, and a good scan cost real money. Drop the scans into the layout. More revisions. Week six and beyond: Prepare files for the printer. This was an art form in itself — trapping, separating colors, creating film output. Send everything to the service bureau. Get blueline proofs back. Check everything. Find the one thing that's wrong. Fix it. Send it again.

Six weeks. For a logo, a brochure, and some photos. And that was moving fast. That was a shop that had its act together.

Now think about what was actually happening during those six weeks. How much of that time was the creative work itself — the thinking, the designing, the photographing? Maybe a week. Maybe less. The rest was logistics. It was waiting. It was driving. It was the friction that existed between every single step.

That friction was the gap. And it was everywhere.

Want to send a file to someone? Put it on a Zip disk and mail it. Or later, burn a CD. Want to show a client a mockup? Print it, mount it, present it in person. Want to find a stock photo? Flip through a catalog, call the stock house, wait for them to mail you a transparency. Want to check a fact for the copy you're writing? Drive to the library or call somebody who might know.

Every action had a delay built into it. And those delays compounded. A project that should have taken days took weeks. A project that should have taken weeks took months. And the most frustrating part was that everyone accepted it. That was just how long things took. You built it into your estimates. You told clients, "We'll have something for you in three to four weeks," and they nodded, because that's what they expected.

But underneath that acceptance, there was always this feeling — at least for me — that most of that time was wasted. Not on craft. Not on thinking. On the mechanics of getting things from here to there. On the gap.

I didn't know it at the time, but what I was looking for — what I think every creative professional has always been looking for — was a way to fold that time. To take six weeks and make it two. To take two weeks and make it two days.

The first tool that really did that was the internet.