Design48 is the online portfolio of work I have done for a number of corporations over my 40-year career in Silicon Valley. I have also used the titles Designstudio8 and Thetawaves to differentiate my webdesign from my graphic work, and my corporate work from my creative work. But I find it harder than ever to keep these things in separate categories. These days a beautiful webpage is just as pleasing to me as an oil painting, and I can get just as excited when I get some javascript to work as when I am able to render the feathers on a bird well. It's a great time to be an artist of any kind. More...

The field of graphic design was forever changed by the invention of the personal computer. For at least a century, graphic design was done on a drafting table. Printing production processes changed slowly. What used to be called commercial art, including graphic design, is now almost exclusively produced on a computer with software such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and InDesign. A certain amount of planning and preliminary thought processes are still done with pencil and paper, but most of the production process is done with software. It wasn't always so. Software companies like Adobe and Macromedia grew out of the computer revolution.

In the mid 1980's, Adobe started creating software for the new Mac, and the loyalty of artists towards the Mac persisted until Adobe started building for the PC. Microsoft went public in 1986. Until then, most of the commercial art and graphic design world was still working on drafting tables. Things changed rapidly after that year. By the early 90's it was assumed that computer graphics was a major part of the job of a graphic artist. Artists were expected to learn software programs with ease, and to be as proficient with a mouse as they had been with a pen, or the ever present xacto blade. Prior to the computer, "cut" and "paste" had been literal terms. Elements of a design were cut and pasted onto a paper format, and then photographed for print production. Page layout and the principles of good design didn't change much, but the methods used in production certainly did. And more change was on the way with the introduction of the internet...

The history of the internet begins with the end of the Cold War.
In the early 90's, DARPANet (Defense Advanced Research Project Net) was released to the public domain. With the introduction of the internet for commercial purposes, graphic design again went through a revolution in production processes. By the late 90's, not only was graphic design done almost exclusively on a computer, it was published to the internet using development tools like HTML and javascript. Photoshop, the industry-standard for the print world, found new uses in the creation of low-resolution web graphics and animations.

Every art school on the planet now teaches webdesign. Art students know that they are expected to be engineers if they want to make a living as graphic designers. Even if they are fine artists, they are aware of the web as a new marketplace for their work. Every major and minor art gallery has a website. In addition, fine art of all kinds is sold on ebay and other online malls. I dare say that any internet engineer in Silicon Valley probably makes more money than 99% of the fine artists who post their work on any of these malls, including ebay. More...