January 2000
Sorry boys the bell is ringing for the midnight at the end of the digital age. It’s no longer enough to know how to order bottled lager in pidgin html in a groovy bar deep in the silicon ditch. Everyone speaks fluent English (or was that American) now and you can’t stay ahead of the game by sitting at home fiddling with your ISDN connection. dot com guy might have a thriving social and sex life on the internet but when he wants to eat something, a real person will have to deliver it, and when they ring the bell he’ll have to answer the door. While the digital aesthetic was fun for a while, the no rules, wild frontier has been staked out by very straight and very boring fences. The technical texture tribes have been rounded up and sent to their reservations; big chief random construction lines sits proud over little running blur and his pixellated braves. There won’t be any new smoke signals on the horizon until the Photoshop 6.0 upgrade cavalry arrives.
As the new dawn fades, I am as sad as the next man to see the old school design and advertising media roll into town with big wads of cash and buy up all the best real estate. The Wild West might have been a big place but sooner or later every single inch of it was going to be owned by one American or another. But the internet has no such physical constraints. Once sex.com, drugs.com and rocknroll.com have been successfully cornered by multinational concerns there are plenty of new worlds to conquer. However you won’t find them in the little boys room at Razorfish or in the beer fridge at Deepend. My advice would be to sign up with one of the big recruitment agencies and then bugger off on holiday for a couple of months and see the world, while they negotiate a massive pay and benefits package for you, and don’t forget your share options.