Abstract
This paper presents a reflective examination of challenges to design and communication from the current digital revolution, using the prism of a 1980s television advertisement for the Yellow Pages. Originating at the same time as the height of the desktop publishing revolution, the advert illuminates a transitional period in the evolution of digital technology and media communications, marked by changing user practices and experiences. The advert’s storyline follows a young man’s quest to convert an old cine film (of his father) to videotape for his mother’s birthday, in the process showcasing the impending shift from analogue to digital technologies and encapsulating the multifaceted implications and transitional challenges of the period. The hybrid setting of technologies, alongside the tensions, confusion and ambiguities of different stakeholders metaphorically symbolises and can be contrasted alongside, the challenges impacting the design, media and communications industry of the period and can inform reflection on contemporary challenges. Engaging with the narrative, the Yellow Pages advert is used as a creative device which functions as a cultural, historical, narrative lens with which to contrast against contemporary (and future) transitional challenges within the digital revolution.
Keywords
Introduction
There is a television advert that ran from the mid-1980s for the Yellow Pages (1985) business directory. It features a man wandering the streets of a UK city searching for a business that can convert some old 8 mm cine film to a more modern format, in this case videotape. After a fruitless search, the man eventually wises up and browses a physical copy of the Yellow Pages before using a telephone to successfully find a supplier that can carry out the task. The advert concludes with the man giving the converted video to his mother for her birthday. Upon playing the tape, comprising nostalgic black and white scenes of her (presumably deceased) husband she exclaims wistfully, ‘aye, he was a good looking fella your dad’.
The emotivity of the advert is as equally powerful and shameless as only the best classic television advertising can produce. But the many mnemonic devices used in the advert not only assure its required memorability but, in reflecting back on the advert, also serve to portray a cultural historical snapshot of technological disruption during a key transitory period in the evolutionary narrative of, what has come to be known as, the digital revolution.
This piece is written from the perspective of a design scholar (and former practitioner). However, acknowledging the discourse is heavily influenced by ‘inquiry into the “newness” of media’ (Menke and Schwarzenegger, 2019: 657), the aim is also to initiate dialogue with media and communication scholars. The writing focusses on the impact of technological change on design practice, in particular its graphic and communication implementations, alongside aligned communication mediums. Additionally, and mindful of Peters’ (2009) observations about forms of communicating media history as well as the subject matter, this piece also functions as a methodical reflection in the form of a design research approach that will be discussed shortly.
The technologies featured in the Yellow Pages advert overwhelmingly intersect with practices, outputs or processes of design from the period. Correspondingly, and noting the use of narrative for contextualising overlapping historical notions of old and new media (Lesage and Natale, 2019), this piece engages with the advert as a narrative conduit for reflecting on how some of the challenges and ambiguities of technological encroachment into everyday life at the time, can help to explore more specific design perspectives during the transition from analogue to digital practices originating in the mid-1980s. In doing so, the piece also discusses the contemporaneous evolution and impact of technologies that impacted design practice; how some succeeded and others failed, as well as how some adapted and even continue to be relevant or informative in current design and communication practice.
In reflecting on the Yellow Pages advert, this piece itself serves as a design research device for interrogating a period of technological transition that was both disruptive and enabling for the design industry. As will be discussed, by drawing on defamiliarisation as a design methodology, this piece contextualises the importance of narrative and storytelling in design practice for helping to unravel challenging issues by looking at them from a ‘different angle’, as well as reflecting on how the Yellow Pages advert itself also functions as such a device. In summarising, I will reflect on how similar approaches may be helpful for scholars of social and cultural aspects of design, for exploring past technological challenges to design in relation to contemporary ones, and perhaps even to help prepare for future technological innovations.
A funny looking video
The Yellow Pages advert portrays the main protagonist’s search among several physical shops and his face-to-face discussions with a variety of shopkeepers, all of whom are unable to help. As the advert progresses, the diligent son becomes increasingly frantic in his efforts to convert the 8 mm cine film, in the process confounding most of the people he encounters. He meets a confused Generation Xer who is flummoxed by the ‘funny looking video’, a head shaking photographic shop worker, as well as an older antique shop owner who is knowledgeable about the format but, having sold an 8 mm projector the previous week, laments ‘I don’t know when another might turn up’, thus signifying that the days of home cine-film are well and truly over.
Balbi (2015) has noted that old and new media do not evolve in historical isolation from each other. Similarly, Edgerton (2011) long ago observed that older technologies or ‘things’ seemingly persist long after newer technologies have been introduced. As discussed throughout this piece, these technologies engage, interact and contextually adapt in a variety of ways. Similarly, the performative exchanges between the advert’s protagonist and the supporting cast metaphorically symbolise a hybrid period of technological transition from analogue to digital, as well as of a hybridity and transitory period of human knowledge and, as Simone Natale (2016) has noted, of how media is experienced. The Generation Xer is portrayed as infuriatingly ignorant about even the possible existence of pre-videotape technology, extracting a weary look from our main protagonist. The photography shop worker is barely interested – after all, he’s there to sell current technology; and the elderly antique shop owner, having sold the last 8 mm projector, serves as a wistful reminder that the past can never be reclaimed. The son’s journey and increasingly frustrating exchanges with each character are assumedly all intentionally portrayed by the advert’s art directors, with the aim of indicating the futility of such an outdated mode of enquiry – physically walking from shop to shop – when a satisfactory outcome can be easily and quickly obtained using a combination of a business directory and a telephone. Notably, at no point in the narrative is our main protagonist depicted as having been foolish in attempting the first approach. ‘Sometimes to solve a problem, you need to approach it from a different angle’, we are told by a pastoral soothing voiceover from ‘good old Yellow Pages’, as it finally dawns on our hero to look for cine-film to video conversion services in the directory and to make a (landline) telephone call. Of course, approaching problems from a different angle is a classic function of many design approaches (including this piece) and is a discussion that I shall return to later.
Tellingly, the Yellow Pages directory page depicting the company that our protagonist has located also shows that they convert cine-film to DVD, further indicating the transitory technological availability of the time. It is a hybrid technological period that is further hinted at when the son presents the VHS video to his mother who quips ‘naughty videos’ in a mock risqué tone suggestive of a familiarity, yet not complete comfort, with the technology. For context, by the end of 1985 only 28% of US households had a VCR (Takiff, 1986), and in a similar period in Australia, only 32.7% of households (Ironmonger et al., 2000). Home video remained largely an analogue process until DVDs eventually overtook it by the early 2000s (Silicon Valley Business Journal, 2002), finally completing the transition to digital.
Alongside the primary artefacts of the physical directory and the fixed landline phone, the narrative of the Yellow Pages advert is littered with secondary technological detritus from the period. A CRT television sits on a shelf, next to some prominently displayed ring binders, books and, almost hidden just to side of the screen, is an early all-in-one black and white Apple Macintosh computer. Presumably, at this early stage, the Macintosh in such a scenario would unlikely to be internet connected and, even if it were, it would have held no advantage in either converting the video, nor tracking down a source for doing so.
Of course, a 21st century equivalent of this narrative would likely comprise more intermedial (Balbi and Magaudda, 2018) interactions, perhaps involving downloading an app or uploading a digital file, to perform a contemporarily equivalent function of video conversion – engaging with the rendering of different file formats rather than physical media. But even the mode and communication of this transitional narrative would manifest differently in a contemporary scenario. The Yellow Pages advert itself was made specifically for a television (and perhaps also cinema) audience, to be passively consumed in a linear manner, in-between chronologically programmed and statically consumed television shows. Demographic information would have been relevant, but far from the sophistication that 21st century data mining and user analytics can provide and automatically and interactively be responded to. The Yellow Pages advert, its content and format are the output of a series of creative processes, many of them design. Those processes were also hugely impacted during this pivotal period of technological change, manifesting broadly as the digital revolution.
Design and digital publishing
The Yellow Pages advert featured predominantly during a period (from the mid-1980s) in which desktop publishing (DTP) technology was starting to bring about the digital publishing revolution (Romano and Mitrano, 2019). These digital technologies, comprising of hardware and software, combined to irreversibly change the design and communication industry. Like many of the narratives that emerge from the Yellow Pages advert, DTP had multiple impacts on design, including the processes, the practitioners, the culture, as well as the artefactual outcomes themselves. Also, like the technologies and processes featured in our Yellow Pages advert, while the term revolution is appropriate when retrospectively contextualised, the historical process also contained many periods of evolutionary transition and hybridity.
The emergence of DTP has been documented, for example by Meggs and Purvis (2012) and Romano and Mitrano (2019). However, a review of academic literature suggests that the topic is not specifically investigated as much as might be expected. In particular, its historically contextual challenges have not been extensively analysed in relation to more recent developments in digital design, nor contextually in relation to the future of the digital revolution, with the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) being the standout example. For much of DTPs history, from the 1980s and through to the late 1990s, its function was almost exclusively aimed at using digital technology for producing printed content. Like the physical Yellow Pages directory in the advert, people still overwhelmingly consumed text and graphics in newspapers, magazines and books. Thus, design and publishing technology, while using digital processes, were used predominantly to create analogue products. Most histories rightly attribute technological factors as the impetus for DTP. Certainly, from the mid 1980s onwards, four companies were primarily responsible for the hardware and software that drove the electronic publishing industry. Apple, Adobe, Aldus and Hewlett-Packard each produced key technologies that, when combined, allowed graphic designers, publishers and pre-press professionals to bring much of the design publishing process in-house. This literally created what became known as DTP (Meggs and Purvis, 2012; Romano and Mitrano, 2019).
What is harder to engage with are cultural, or ‘human’ impacts from these digital design challenges – for example, the way in which designers’ interactions and communication with other stakeholders were impacted. It is informative to look at industry debates of the period, such as an overview published in 1991 in Journalism Educator (Thompson and Craig, 1991). ‘Promises and Realities of Desktop Publishing’ discusses several different possible outcomes for design as a result of DTP. One suggested a holistic approach, whereby DTP technologies might enable and enhance skills or democratise the design process, while another forecast that the advantages were largely managerial and economic, to the detriment of the workforce and to design creativity itself (Thompson and Craig, 1991). Clearly, comparisons with current debates about emerging technologies such as AI are unavoidable and it is sobering that another source of the time suggested that DTP technologies themselves might have been ‘intermediate or hybrid’ (Driver and Gillespie, 1992: p158). Evaluating such discussions and predictions over 20 years later is in many ways contextual. DTP, in all but name, is still the primary mode of graphic design production. However, the advent of interactivity added additional elements to design practice, while the democratisation of design has become another outcome (albeit contested) of digital design software technology.
The evolutionary revolution – Desktop ‘kind of’ publishing
While working as a junior designer early in my career, an important stakeholder once asked our creative team to ‘desktop publish’ them 5000 full colour brochures by the end of the week. The request spread panic in the art studio, as such a literal request was (and still is to some degree) not technically realistic with the in-house equipment of a small design studio. At the time, such a large quantity would still have required the services of a commercial offset-litho printing press. Our internal ‘desktop’ printer produced acceptable quality A3 colour proofs, but at a production rate of about one page per minute was entirely unsuited for the requested task. Thus, the DTP moniker was always somewhat symbolic and is perhaps a reason the term is now rarely used.
Similarly, and despite the ‘revolution’ moniker, the digital revolution/third industrial revolution, of which DTP was the core element within design, had a more evolutionary impact on day-to-day design activities. This affected practitioners from design itself, but also design adjacent professions such as pre-press, commercial print production and photography. Indeed, as designers became progressively empowered by digital technologies, allowing them to increasingly transgress across previously demarcated boundaries, aligned professions often became disempowered. This was particularly prominent (albeit manifesting differently) at two stages of the digital design revolution; designing for print and, later, design for the web.
One of the pivotal technologies coming out of DTP, was titled ‘What You See Is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG). This technology first emerged in print design page layout programmes such as QuarkXpress, Pagemaker and, later, InDesign. As the term implies, WYSIWYG allowed designers to create and view most of the elements of a printed document from their desktop monitor in the same format as it would eventually appear once printed. This in itself, put an end to typesetting as a specific practice and profession.
Setting type had for many years been an analogue industrial process involving the analogue assembling of metal letters, while adding photography was an even more laborious and time-consuming process (Hunt, 2005). However, just prior to DTP, a series of hybrid analogue/digital processes, variously known as phototypesetting or photocomposition had emerged. While an advantage over analogue processes, these systems still required skilled technicians to enter codes (analogous to the use of HTML in web page design) and were not something that designers would normally engage with. The invention and adoption of DTP and WYSIWYG put a swift end to these technologies that, in retrospect, can be viewed as comparatively brief and transient. With the advent of the web as a mass communication format, designers were initially reliant on trained web developers (similarly analogous to the pre-press technicians of phototypesetting). Eventually, WYSIWYG technology began to impact web design software and allowed graphic designers to begin to transgress into areas traditionally occupied by developers. However, unlike phototypesetting, this was short-lived and the complexities of producing interactive content, alongside the increasing formats of web 2.0 communication mediums and outlets such as mobile devices, once again expanded the focus of design (reducing the influence of WYSIWYG-specific design activity), promoting the importance of skilled developers, as well as increasing the influence of interactive design practices (Cooper et al., 2014), such as User Interface and User Experience disciplines.
Interactive design also had its false-starts, one example of which manifested in CD-ROM publishing which, for a period in the 1990s appeared to be flourishing, allowing designers to create interactive communication experiences for home and educational consumption. However, the emergence of web 2.0 and interactive online design and publishing significantly curtailed the lifespan of CD-ROM design in the lifespan of the digital design revolution – surpassing the decline timeline of phototypesetting.
Photography and (not so funny looking) video
CD-ROMs also intersect with the history of digital photography – in the form of Kodak’s proprietary PhotoCD technology, which enabled fast and cheap scanning of photographic film onto CDs. However, in addition to Kodak’s failure to take commercial advantage of digital cameras – a technology they invented (Lucas and Goh, 2009) – PhotoCD proved to be another transient hybrid technology. Image quality was not good enough for high-end design (which still used expensive drum scanners for image capture) and at the non-professional end, it was superseded by the advent of increasingly cheap desktop scanners. The persistence of film photography overlapped for some time after the invention of digital cameras, further linking an analogue past and digital present together, until finally digital photography became high enough in quality to be used in professional design for print.
However, once again, the online medium was responsible for a realignment of technological priorities and practices. While traditional design for professional commercial printing purposes required images with high resolutions resulting in large digital files, the web (especially in its pre-broadband format) preferred small and lower resolution images, with speed of display being a priority over quality. This, in turn, enabled the direction of camera development, contributing to the success of camera-phones and their importance in social media, at the expense of dedicated digital cameras (Richter, 2022) – a phenomenon escalating dramatically from the period after 2007, when Apple superseded Nokia as leaders in the smartphone market with their iPhone launch (Evans, 2011).
Photographic image capture has been integral to narratives of technological change and, of course, to the digital revolution – in design as well as socially and culturally. The Yellow Pages advert’s focus on image capture, family and memory is reminiscent of cultural histories of popular video and photographic consumption, for example Kodak’s popularisation of the format – with slogans such as the ‘Kodak Moment’ (previously known as the ‘family moment’) – alongside pastoral imagery of familial documentation and communication (Munir and Phillips, 2005). Such narratives also function as a precursor to Apple’s focus on the ever present (video and still camera-equipped) iPhone becoming a contemporary essential technological life companion.
Then, now and the future – What if it’s not all that different?
There’s a scene in Sorkin’s (2004) The West Wing, where Chief of Staff Leo McGarry laments what he sees as the lack of technological progress during his lifetime, ‘cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don’t even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped’, he exclaims, before concluding ‘where’s my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?’. McGarry’s complaints are performatively quixotic. Clearly technological advancement has progressed, often at a breath-taking pace. Yet some of his critique of the repeatability and application of technological innovation, in particular in the digital paradigm, is worthy of reflection.
We have seen how design within the digital revolution has a tendency to interchangeably reinvent, repurpose, sometimes self-sabotage itself, before often restarting the process once again. As one technology advances, a new paradigm often emerges to challenge it, sometimes rendering it obsolete, while at other times requiring its original format or intention to be reframed, thus influencing further design, innovation and transformation. We saw this with digital photography shifting priorities for the online medium and in our earlier example of WYSIWYG’s recurrent rise, fall and adaptation in relation to design’s relative requirements for skilled programmers. Like our DTP example earlier, contemporary challenges from AI have been said to threaten creative conceptual design with tools such as Canva, which use template driven automation to create design layouts. Similarly, the requirements for skilled software development are being called into question, with claims that tools such as ChatGPT can produce high quality computer code (Naughton, 2023). Nevertheless, both design and development of websites has been under threat for some time by increasingly easy to use ‘off-the-shelf’ content management systems, yet both continue to adapt.
Thus, the evolutionary progression of digital design can be seen variously as punctuated at different times with technologies that were not only hybrid but sometimes also, with the benefit of hindsight, transient. Similarly, intermediate, transitory and hybrid technologies in design have often mirrored societal and cultural representations of their predecessors. In turn, our protagonists from the Yellow Pages advert, are caught in the same repeating forward spiral of design innovation, perhaps requiring future performative narratives about family members, friends or associates to repeatedly grapple with ever-evolving digital challenges. In attempting to peer beyond linear histories of digital design technology from the period of the Yellow Pages advert, one could envisage interviewing retired print and pre-press workers, alongside younger design professionals who became active during the 1980s. Such research would be welcome, as there appears to be a gap in this space and much might be learned from the participants of that transitional and hybrid period, in relation to contemporary challenges to design from current technologies. However, alternative approaches can also play a role.
Approaching problems from a different angle
The Yellow Pages advert pastiches the slogan ‘sometimes to solve a problem, you need to approach it from a different angle’. This call to action depicts the advert’s protagonist finally realising that combining two long-existing analogue technologies, a landline telephone and a business directory, can save time wandering the streets aimlessly looking for specialist services – in this case hybrid technology conversion. Being an advert, the message is gently massaged towards the viewer (and potential consumer) as an empathetic and understanding narrative, using a combination of emotive storyline and pastoral spoken dialogue. Nevertheless, from a design perspective, the narrative can help serve as an allegorical reminder that the apparently obvious is sometimes hiding in plain view, remaining obfuscated for any number of reasons. Indeed, despite knowing the linear history of digital design within the wider framework of the digital revolution, as well as the resultant societal, industrial and economic effects, it is sometimes easy to overlook more banal, everyday human effects – even those recreated by advertising.
Storytelling narratives and performative methods have long been used by designers for unravelling hidden meaning and better understanding problems and contexts. These have ranged from commonly used design methods such as personas and scenarios (Eriksson et al., 2013), to experimental theatrical (Howard et al., 2002) and dramaturgic design research (Meron, 2020). Other design methods are also purposefully devoted to uncovering hidden meanings, or solving ‘wicked’ (Buchanan, 1992) problems, by approaching them from different angles. For example, brainstorming and iterative approaches from design thinking, such as affinity diagramming, are used to make sense of confusingly large and diverse sets of data (Lucero, 2015); experimental tools such as cultural probes have been used to help demystify seemingly banal domestic situations (Loi, 2007); and a staple of design practice, prototyping, has even been used as a historical research tool for evaluating long obsolete technologies (Sayers, 2015).
The overriding way in which many such approaches help designers to uncover, challenge and perhaps even solve problems, is because of their ability to alter the perspective of apparently banal and familiar situations. For example, a technique used by some graphic designers when dealing with typographic issues such as difficult letter-spacing (known as kerning), involves turning the problematic words upside-down. Doing so (literally looking at the problem from a different angle) allows the designers to more easily identify the problematic letter-spacing and address it. It is an approach that draws on existing design practices (Bell et al., 2005) adopted from the early 20th century creative practice theory (Shklovsky, 1917) of defamiliarisation (Lemon and Reis, 1965). Defamiliarisation uses narrative ‘devices’ (Berlina, 2015) to intentionally make something that is normally familiar appear unfamiliar (or ‘differently’ familiar), thus paradoxically rendering it more recognisable (Gurevitch, 1988).
I’ve framed the history of design within the digital revolution as a story of challenges, occasional demarcation transgressions and anxieties about challenges from the democratisation of design and, contemporarily, from automation and AI. Emerging from the hybridity of photocomposition around the mid-1980s with DTP, design then comes into contact with interactivity – firstly as a false-dawn in the form of CD-ROM publishing before being superseded by the web. The online paradigm continues with social media, mobile devices and apps and, of course, the unfinished story of AI. Without the benefit of hindsight, it is still unknown what the impact of various contemporary emerging technologies will be. Some, such as the semantic web, appear to have stalled. Others, such as virtual and augmented reality, web3 and others, remain in-progress and often debated. Some may eventually assume a hybrid role symbolically reminiscent of phototypesetting or CD-ROM publishing, others may flourish in their original form, while others may morph and adapt unrecognisably from their original format and intention. Industrially, some companies may have a transient (albeit prominent) influence like Nokia in the mobile phone market, or become a more persistent innovative presence like Apple. The social, cultural and industrial effects are already being discussed by academics and comparisons of AI with events like the industrial and digital revolutions are inevitable. However, the more everyday and human impacts may not be fully understood for some time.
Engaging critically with the Yellow Pages advert as a (consciously commercial and subjective) narrative device, provides a differently familiar representation of an acute period of technological change, with the impacts of its hybridity on the various protagonists magnified. Contrasting that alongside our knowledge of digital changes within the design industry of the period, can help to inform our way of thinking about challenges that were faced at the time (and perhaps even some that have been overlooked). Doing so, may also help to contextualise and focus on contemporary digital design challenges and perhaps even pre-empt and better prepare for future ones.
