Introduction chapter to New Media Design

Graphic design is the arrangement of textual and visual information for the purpose of communication.  Many elements in our surroundings have been created by graphic designers such as signs, print media, titles for television, websites, and much more.  Two major forms of media are old media and new media.  Old media consists of anything produced before the Internet such as print, film, and television.  Analog technologies and linear narratives are characteristics of this form.  New media includes anything produced by the Internet or anything digital.  A major advantage to new media is the use of interactivity, which allows the audience to play an active role.  A lot of the technologies rely on numbers and bits stored as information, which can be endlessly manipulated.  Thus, new media is always evolving and becoming a distinct part of communication, not just a reinvention of old media.  Digital media is much more versatile in that it can be easily changed without loss of quality, easily transferred to other places, and stored in a database for a long period of time.  New innovations in this form of communication has created new sub-industries and allowed graphic designers to expand into other areas.  Design is now needed virtually everywhere on the Internet, video games, music videos, film, and television, extending beyond just print mediums.

It’s absolutely true.  Graphic design as a profession is seeing a major increase in all types of communication fields.  It is a very relevant occupation, as almost every sort of outlet requires some sort of design.  This introduction chapter is an accurate summary of new media, however, it is just that.  It covers the broad aspects of technologies and only generalizes the industry of design in today’s climate, which is probably all it is intending to convey.  Old media technologies such as analog have certainly “lost” to digital, but the text fails to recognize the little (though, far and few between) advantages it does have.  Analog technologies, as opposed to digital files that have a finite amount of quality, do not have a cap to the quality of media, making it unlimited.  For example, those analog records have uncompressed frequencies that allows sound waves to be infinite, while digital music, even at its highest quality, has a stopping point for frequency (though we may not notice, but scientifically speaking, it cannot reproduce analog sound).  A similar argument can be made for film versus digital video where depth of field is an issue.  Otherwise, this chapter seems to cover all the major points of new media and the rise of graphic design.