Design Tips – Pre-Media Artists Improve Your Skills

Hey, this is gonna be a very short and sweet one. I posted about online training and whether you would rather use free youtube style coaching videos that are crowd-sourced or pay for the professional training. But I didn’t talk about tips and techniques that you can use. There are thousands out there and one of my favourites is Minervity run by Richard Darell from Sweden.

He provides a great selection of tips and links to useful sites and his site is growing in popularity with over 180 thousand visitors in the 6 or so months he has been running.

Check it out yourself.

Author: Gary George

A new age for pre-media

Before the dawn of time communication between people through verbal or visual methods, the Egyptians invented Papyrus sometime around 3500BC which much later transformed into paper around 105BC (although other sources date this at around 8AD) either way communication took a giant leap forward. over the centuries since it’s first invention, we have seen the methods of paper based communication explode fostering a limitless industry of design communication. The last decade saw the Web become mainstream into many households around the world taking from a business based communication tool to a consumer based one, this lead to marketing department to explore new ways to get their message to their customers and potential customers….
Pre-Press once know for it’s methods of preparing files for print needed to evolve, or did it? Pre-Press is still a vital part of the supply chain and still needs to exist as a method of ensuring that the information that is printed is fit for purpose, albeit more automated with less and less human intervention.
A new term need to cover the growing companies that wanted to extend their services to their customers but utilizing both new and old technology communication methods, Pre-Media was born….. Still a very new term in the grand scheme of things, pre-media companies are able to offer their clients more and more ways to leverage the marketing materials that were once destined for the printed page and extend their reach further into the vast array of consumers they could be missing.

To frame the term into a digestible sentence we like to think of it like this:
‘Pre-media is the term used in the design, creative and publishing industries for the processes and procedures that occur between the conception of the original artwork, and the manufacturing of final output channel.’

The key here is the final output channel, once there was paper, then came radio followed by screen casts (TV & Cinema) followed by the web and finally the mobile communication device, each of these provide a myriad of marketing possibilities and ways to target specific demographics for your message.

So what’s next?

Business intelligence has played a huge part in bringing your business to the next level, we have seen a huge increase in social networking, self publishing (just like me blogging now), virtual worlds, lifestreams, discussion groups, video shares etc etc etc the list goes on, so can we harness the information that is captured here? Will the Web 3.0 platform actually provide our pre-media companies with the tools to capture and act upon live data in a way that will allow instant focused pre-media marketing campaigns?
Can we harness the power of crowd-sourced information to shape the way our brands communicate back to us?

My feeling is yes we can, and companies that are part of the innovation crowd and the early adopters will reap the benefits of the riches it will bring.

Author: Gary George