Although my background is in fine art...
Like artists everywhere and at all times in history, we have to work for whoever is signing the paychecks. Even Leonardo DaVinci had to design war machinery to make a living, and his contemporary genius, Michelangelo, had to paint and sculpt whatever the Pope wanted. These days, we work for corporations, the new feudalism.
After 18 years on the drafting table,
I learned to create graphics on the computer, starting on a VAX workstation in 1986. When I had another 10 years on the computer, I had to learn to design for the browser. For starters, that involved learning HTML. It was a whole new way of doing graphic design. The web opened up lots of new jobs for everyone, particularly graphic designers and commercial artists. By the millenium, webdesign was but another part of the repertoire of the graphic designer.
More Ancient History
In September of 1980, with 12 years of graphic design experience already, I was hired at Lockheed Corporation as a technical illustrator. Promoted to commercial artist in 1990, I acted as assistant art coordinator at night in a team of five artists. Our average document consisted of thousands of pages of technical graphics and text for contract proposal documents, slideshows (PowerPoint) and various other print collateral products. After the first six years on a drafting table, the next seven years I worked mostly on a unix mainframe called a VAX, and also on a rather primitive macintosh. (The macs these days are a world of difference.) Because I worked for tech pubs, I worked on virtually every major program at Lockheed: Hubble Space Telescope, International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, Milstar, and lots of smaller programs. The sheer scale of military programs is staggering...