Diversifying Designers Turning to Mix of Media

The above-mentioned trends spotted when comparing annually the top 10 sales opportunities for creatives indicate several things.

The first is obvious: the Web boom is over. Gears have shifted from "buildout" (i.e. new site development and from-the-ground-up Web presence building) to "maintenance and expansion" of pre-existing Web sites. In essence, everyone who is likely to have a Web presence has one, thus there is decreasing demand for the arsenals of creative Web design talent that plied their trade a year ago. The nature of current Web work is not all that demanding, and much of it can even be handled in house by the clients themselves in many cases. This is not to say that demand for new sites is completely gone; there will always be new companies forming, reorganizing, and rebranding, but this volume will be nothing like it had been.

Secondly, and perhaps most important to printers, is that creatives are now "coming home" to print. They've had their "lost weekend" with quixotic Web ventures, but now it's time to return to bread-and-butter print work. Unfortunately, in some cases much of this print work just isn't there anymore. The economic downturn has led many, if not most, firms to slash marketing, promotion, and advertising budgets, which means that creatives' clients aren't asking for a lot of the printed material that they had sought in the past. When the economy rebounds—the timeframe of which is difficult to predict primarily in light of the tragic events that occurred on September 11—much of this work will come back. However, many jobs like brochures and other marketing material have migrated onto the Web or onto electronic-only distribution such as PDF, never to return to print.

Some creatives can take up this slack by simply working on the new-media iterations, but depending on the nature of those materials, clients may be just as likely to handle it themselves. Any savvy creative professional recognizes that all these opportunities will pay off when they are seen as complementing, rather than competing with, each other.