We create digital work in a medium that is fast paced, and ever passing. Our work becomes as quickly forgotten as scrolling through your social feed on your mobile device. We spend hours creating work that disapates into the byte / pixel ether. Never to be remembered. Only to live in small corners on the web in the form of artifacts of our past portfolios. Broken bits and pieces of work taken out of context and experience, only to revive itself in a form that it was never meant to exist.
The work itself is not real. It’s a form of some interaction, experience, or emotion existing within something that is real.
As we create new work. We pay attention to the details. We sweat all the small pixel perfect pieces of execution. We revise. We evaluate. We meet deadlines to drive out new pieces of our work, our existence, our craft. Only for it to serve as a fleeting memory to ourselves – a self serving love letter that somehow we have brought value to a world driven by click bait, capitalism, marketing and bullshit.
We, as designers, have never existed this deep in the digital industry. Each day is a new step into a path unknown. Into another round of revisions for work that will be forgotten almost as soon as it is viewed.
The unmemorable work we create is not any discredit to hours, work and revisions put into any digital design, but we are merely a cog in a wheel that used to churn on curiosity, innovation and exploration of creating new work in digital formats – has shifted to being driven by capitalism, commerce, analytics.
We move quickly. We make decisions based on impact, numbers, analytics and impressions.
I will only move forward and work on things with purpose and meaning to drive myself and humanity forward.
My work may become obsolete in the digital ether, but the emotions and experience will live on.