Travel broadens the mind. Learning other languages increases our awareness of other perspectives and expressions. Using two page layout programs is a pain in the butt - kind of like travel or language lessons. I’ve noticed that I long for abilities on one application that are in the other application. But then, I (and probably everyone else) has longed for features in their favorite app that aren’t built into it. Tim Gill, Quark’s founder and chief architect, foresaw this and invented the first extensible application: QuarkXPress. Mostly because the hardware in 1988 was very limited, he created an application that efficiently performed most tasks a designer would want. Beyond that, you could buy an XTension. Today I’m spending time browsing the many plug-ins at ThePowerXChange.

Constrained by language. If my language doesn’t have a way to express the thought or feeling that I really want you to understand, I borrow a word or phrase from another language. We’re all used to that. But when it comes to using design applications, we just can’t do that (at least, not very easily). If I want to instantly convert an InDesign layout to a Web page, I’m out of luck. If I want to format a long block of text by using nested styles in QuarkXPress, same roadblock. I’m not happy that my tools are constraining my ability to express myself. Somehow, they’ve managed to ‘keep me down on the farm’, even though ‘I’ve seen Paris.’ Maybe there’s a plug-in I can get that will let me do these things.

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Today my projects required me to use both InDesign and QuarkXPress, and I began to feel a little bit bilingual. I can’t claim to be bilingual in any other sense, but I’ve noticed that those who are truly bilingual will sometimes have moments of forgetting that they’re speaking one language and use a word from a different language: forgetting to translate into the intended language.

Which of course is what happened to me all day. I was focused on what I wanted to happen (or communicate), and forgot that the tool required me to choose a tiny menu off the side of a palette, instead of a submenu off a menu in the menu bar. I can almost feel my mind expanding.

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I believe that applications and operating systems shape the way we think. It’s only natural that people take the path of least resistance, and in the design world that means using tools that are easiest to use. You can see it in the evolution of the appearance of magazines, advertisements, and everything else that uses words and pictures. Compare anything printed in the early 1980s with those from the early 1990s and beyond, and you’ll see how QuarkXPress, Illustrator, and PostScript dramatically changed the direction of graphic design. The tools actually shaped the way we think, just as human language (another tool) does.

So, what happens when we NEED to frequently think beyond what our tool allows? We create new words, new meanings for existing words, and new programs for page layout…

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Today at the Conference on World Affairs, I attended a panel session on how our language is changing. And something occurred to me: because our industry is now actively using two page layout applications, graphic designers are becoming “bilingual”, for lack of a more appropriate term. To work effectively, we need to know how to use both QuarkXPress and InDesign well enough to make changes in existing documents, and perhaps even design new ones.

To me, it’s an example of the globalization of everything: we’re learning to understand and respect the perspectives, beliefs, preferences, and even page layout applications that have been adopted by others. So how does this affect the way we THINK? That’s what I’m thinking about now…

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