The Speed Doubled, Then Doubled Again

Once the internet got its footing, things started moving fast. And I mean fast in a way that was hard to keep up with, even for people who were paying attention.

Broadband replaced dial-up, and suddenly you could send files that would have taken all night in a matter of minutes. Digital cameras replaced film — first badly, then adequately, then brilliantly. I went from shooting on film and waiting days for results to shooting digital and seeing the image instantly on the back of the camera. That alone was a revolution. No more hoping. Now you could see, adjust, and reshoot on the spot.

Then the software caught up. Photoshop went from a neat tool to the backbone of the entire visual industry. InDesign replaced the old paste-up process entirely. Illustrator became so capable that things that once required a specialized typesetter or illustrator could be done by one person at one desk.

And with every leap, the timeline compressed.

A logo project that took six weeks in the early '90s? By the mid-2000s, it could be done in two weeks. By 2010, a week. Not because anyone was cutting corners on the creative work — the thinking, the strategy, the craft still took what it took. But because every piece of friction around that work had been reduced or eliminated. And here's something that changed the game completely: it used to take real money and real time to start a company. You needed an office. You needed printed materials. You needed to build relationships face to face. The overhead was enormous. But as the internet matured and the tools got faster, all of that compressed too.

I watched people go from "I have a business idea" to "I have a business" in two or three days. Not months. Days. If you had a good web designer — or if you were one — you could have a professional- looking brand, a website, and a way to take orders by the end of the weekend.

That was unthinkable ten years earlier. And it was the internet that made it possible. The web gave everyone a storefront. Social media gave everyone a megaphone. Email gave everyone a direct line to their customers. Digital tools gave everyone a production studio.

The gap kept folding. The time between "what if" and "here it is" kept shrinking. And every time it shrank, new possibilities opened up — new businesses, new careers, new ways of working that simply couldn't have existed when everything took six weeks.

I watched this happen from my studio in Gadsden. I was designing websites for clients, building brands, shooting photography that went straight from camera to screen to client without a single roll of film or a single trip to the lab. I was quoting projects in days instead of weeks. And my clients were launching faster too — which meant they needed more work, more often, on tighter timelines.

The speed became the expectation. And for creative professionals, that meant you had two choices: learn to work at the new speed, or get left behind. I chose to learn. I've been choosing to learn at every single technological shift in my career. And that brings us to the biggest fold yet.