Before to start this cronique I will like to thank the invitation that you made me know for participating in this electronic magazine.

Just 20 years ago, the work of a designer wasn’t, as to say, simple or easy, not suggesting that it is know. Tools like stilographs, line draft, acrylics, brushes, color pencils, water colors, oil markers, the sticker ABC, every kind of pencils, and industrial quantity of paper, between others, were looking in big tables work.
 In those days, for saying, the designer worked for an art director, and in the same time existed support between photographs and illustrators.

All this made possible to create, in my way to see it, two characteristics, that I hardly see in a lots of today’s designers.
1) To know how to work in a team, I mean to not considerate a team like the concentration of individual talents ( you make that. I make this, and in the end we put it together..) And make every project richer with vision and shared action.
2) The capability and ability to use different kind of materials to create, letting them selves  to make bigger their personal experience.
And from this second characteristic I wish to make the reference in this opportunity.

It is a fact, that the creation, and the constant and the easy access to a computer with the daily innovations had changed completely the world of 20 years ago. Yes, they have made possible that the work of the people be more efficient, but in the case of some designers, has make this the only option to create.
In the present exist the idea that a designer with out computer is not a designer.
¿it’s possible, then that any person with a computer is a designer?

The computer had aloud compress a with out number of tools for the daily use of any person, between them, the designers. If, by example, I wish to generate a draw, I can make one in programs of vectorial draw. Or better yet, if I want more effects or to text, I could make it in an editor program.
But ¿why should I don’t dare to create my owns textures with paper, color, sand, oil color, photographies and then digitalize? Is not obvious all the habilities lost in the designer for the born and the popularity of the computer?
Is clear all the creativity that is left behind, ´cause all this tools are creative detonates.

The most listen reasons are “the computer is faster” “ the project is to expensive if I use the normal tools” for what I make them if the computer has already many preinstalled?”
In front of this my question is ¿ are this, truly, the reasons or they’re just excuses?
Not so long ago I readied an article about a Mexican designer that had the chance to make the art of a cover and the inside of a recompilation of Johnny Cash in a special edition: “Johnny Cash; the legend.”  Work that made him win a Grammy for direction of art and design of book-album. The name of this winner is Ian Cuttler, who is an art director, designer and photographer. How ever in a short age his interest in art was notable, and thanks for her painter mother his passion was growing. After more than 12 years of living in U.S.A. has made such a good fame that now he is the one who decides in what project is evolved and witch not.

I don´r hesitate even for one moment that the finals touches of his project were made in a computer, but the entire before process to arrive to this point was very rich in the way of the concept, of the photography recompilation, etc.
All the ability, concepts and above all, the luxury of experience is one of the qualities that make him big as a designer.

It is clear that many of the institutions of design education, in a national level, don’t make students experimenting with tools different to the computer, and is from here the big quantity of institutions that make designers in one or one year and a half teaching only computer programs.
And in all those universities where the academic charge is involve with history, art, plastics… the students act not interested in all this subject and go to the computer again.
¿does any person that knows how to work in a computer is a designer?
¿and history and the use of watercolors and acrylics and the speech, and the rhetoric, semantic, the typography and the editorial design?
In the end any person can learn how to manage a computer program, which is the easy part. But all the knowledge in a career, I can not get it in only one year curse.
Even if it looks the opposite, this article, that I try to write in the name of design and not against it, is not either against the use of the computer, all the opposite, I am conscious of the great value that it can have like a tool.
But ¿what it will happen if 3 days before having a meeting with your client your computer has an accident loosing all the information?
You call and postpone the meeting or you use the imagination making something up like a good Mexican?

What I pretend is to make the invitation to all designers to not leave all the tools of the “old school”. There is much more of them that only a computer ¡less use them!
Lest show that we are designers and less make clear the difference between.