Essay: The Cult of the Amateur

3. Digital media put the tools of production into the hands of the everyday computer user making it incredibly easy to produce content. These creative skills used to be something that people worked to develop. Now it appears that amateurs can produce content of a fair standard within a relatively short period of time. Where does this leave 'professionals' and highly skilled artists? Choose one area of creativity and discuss some of the challenges facing practitioners vs. amateurs in producing digital content.

The cult of the amateur is on the rise. The 21^st century is seeing a dramatic explosion in the field of amateur culture and creativity and the graphic design industry appears to be sitting on this cusp of cultural change. 1 This essay is born out of a curiosity into the challenges facing practitioners of the design industry. These challenges of course are the result of digital media putting the tools and power of production into the hands of amateurs. They include such things as finding a clear distinction between practitioners and amateurs in terms of critical thinking, recognition of qualification, a battle for employment and where they stand in market value. 

The definitions bow and break when trying to understand what a designer really is. Graphic design branches out into so many niche markets and the demographic ranges from the homespun computer savvy teenagers, to the academics, to the retired masters. So where do you draw the line between the professional and the amateur? 

The word ‘amateur’, derived from the Latin term ‘amator’, means to engage in without payment, a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity. 2 In the 21st century, the cult of the amateur has been facilitated by the ever-expanding growth in technology and media communications. Digital media has enhanced the ability to produce digital content without the need for prior experience within the field or even highly developed creative skills.

The challenge for finding a distinction between amateurs and professionals is a highly topical and lies in the method, content and process of their critical thinking. Andy Rutledge writes in his article ‘Professional Thinking’ 3 that “the difference between how a professional chess player thinks and how an amateur chess player thinks is largely responsible for the most significant difference in their respective results. It’s the same for Web designers.” He develops the idea that there must be a clear distinction between amateur behaviour and professional behaviour among web and graphic designers and even more fine-lined, a clear distinction between their critical thinking. Anton Peck talks about designers having a “graphics mindset”. 4 If you’re not automatically conceiving concept and stylistic treatment for content when developing a design, then both you and your clients are at a dire disadvantage. Rutledge says that ‘pros need to think like pros’ and suggests in adopting a professional mindset. But that’s where the distinction between amateur and professional is blurred, anyone can adopt a professional mindset and so potentially anyone can ‘think like a pro’. Professionals though, have a responsibility to get the job done in ways that differ from that of amateurs and true ‘professional thinking’ is required for this to happen. The thin line between professionals and amateurs then carries on into a discussion of qualifications.

Graphic designers are not regulated by Government. In the 21st century there is no need to even waver a license under the nose of a potential employer. In today’s day and age the majority of graphic designers work on a freelance basis and jobs are landed in recognition and virtue of skill. Professionals of the graphic design industry are ‘qualified’ on a basis of learned, built and crafted skill. Amateurs of the graphic design industry are not ‘qualified’ they are self-taught. In recent times we’ve seen an upward spiral of graphic design courses in Universities and schools, but whether this produces professional ‘designers’ is another question. Really, these courses “churn out a production line of mac/pc/adobe operators rather than designers” and that’s exactly what there is a demand for, “people who can operate specialist machinery in a particular field, and do it well, to achieve the results desired by their employer and essentially the client.” 5

As Buchanan sees it, “the news for graphic designers is mostly troubling,” 6 because professionals with a ‘qualification’ are now competing in a dog-eat-dog world. Graphic design continues to remain more of a ‘field’ than a true discipline and as a result of digital media putting the tools of production into the hands of amateurs, professionals are in conquest to acquire a bit of recognition for their rudimentary hard work and time.

This path of discussion then lends itself to the battle between amateurs and professionals over employment. The practice of graphic design is at a fragile moment. It seems as though amateurs can do what the professionals do for less money and in less time. Professor Lawrence Lessig, an advocate of “free culture” says “digital tools are inspiring creativity in a way that we have not seen in a very long time”. 7 Amateurs are producing new forms of creativity within the digital content they generate and it seems they are already matching the high standards of learned professionals who have steadily worked to ground themselves in the graphic design industry. When it comes to employment though, professionals should naturally come out on top. In David Barringer’s article ‘Myths of the Self-Taught Designer’ notions of credentials are discussed as “proxy symbols of economic worth.” Those candidates lacking credentials suffer a handicap in the eyes of the potential employer. 8

Professionals (in respect to market value) hold over amateurs: an education, experience, a skill set and a portfolio, but in the dog-eat-dog world these are merely overlooked by companies wishing to cash in on the “uncooked, the untrained, and the unpaid.” 9 Meaning that employers in more cases then one will turn to the cheaper option of the two and pluck an amateur from the field to do a professionals job.

As we progress through this technologically-tuned century though, the flooding of the industry will start to shake out the truly talented people. Tim Kolb in his article ‘Entering the age of the expertise’ says that he fears “clients and employers will think of [our] skills as more of a commodity.” 10 However as the graphic design field becomes less mysterious, the tides will change and it will finally become clear that the equipment is in fact the commodity.

So even though we are facing the cult rise of the amateur in the 21^st century, the challenges that professionals are in blight with are not such a huge concern - as the nuances in skill and accreditation will rule out in the end. We will not see an elimination of professional creators, but we will see it complemented by a much wider range of amateur culture in the original sense of the word amateur – “in that people do it purely for the love of creating." 11

References

1 - Casey, Cheryl A. 2007, ‘The Cult of the Amateur’, viewed October 7, 2009, <http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/review/cult-of-the-amateur>

2 – The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English 2009, ‘Amateur’, viewed October 7, 2009, <http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-amateur.html>

3 – Rutledge, Andy, ‘Professional Thinking’, Design + View, July 24, 2007, Retrieved October 12, 2009, from <http://www.andyrutledge.com/pro-thinking.php>

4 – Peck, Anton, ‘The Missing Link of Web Design’, Anton Peck Journal, July 21, 2007, Retrieved October 8, 2009 from <http://antonpeck.com/journal/article/the_missing_link_of_web_design/>

5 – Miller, Vikki, ‘The end of Graphic Design as we know it’, This is it Blog, March 26, 2009, viewed October 18, 2009, <http://www.vikkimiller.com/blog/2009/03/graphic-design-final-frontier.html>

6 – Poynor, Rick 2008, ‘It’s the end of graphic design as we know it’ – Opinion in Vol. 69 of Eye Magazine, viewed October 17, 2009 <http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion.php?id=160&oid=453>

7 – ‘Amateur culture set to explode’, BBC News, July 18, 2005, Retrieved October 22, 2009, from <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4685471.stm>

8 – Barringer, David ‘Myths of the Self-Taught Designer: The Second Conversation between Ego and the Devil’, AIGA, June 9, 2005, Retrieved October 17, 2009 from <http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/myths-of-the-self-taught-designer-the-second-conversation-betwee>

9 – ‘For Love or Money’, Mother Jones January/February 2007 Issue, Retrieved October 17, 2009 from <http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/01/love-or-money>

10 – Kolb, Tim 2009, ‘Entering the age of expertise’, viewed October 18 2009, <http://library.creativecow.net/articles/kolb_tim/age_of_expertise.php>

11 – ‘Amateur culture set to explode’, BBC News, July 18, 2005, Retrieved October 22, 2009, from <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4685471.stm>