Back in the last century, when we got started as designers and our clients paid their bills (unlike today – You know who you are), we used to work with companies’ directorates.

Usually the personnel manager would call us in to discuss the new magazine/sales leaflets/whatever. They would pass us over to the senior manager or director it was destined for, most likely the head of sales. We worked directly with them. They took the decisions, accepted to proofs and things went wonderfully smoothly. If they also took the opportunity to get few more hairs added to their heads, maybe a tummy tuck and wrinkles removed, so what. We were pleased to oblige with early pre-Photoshop image editors.

The good old days

If only things were like that nowadays. It must be a feature of our education system, teaching children to work collaboratively. Will no-one will make a decision on their own nowadays? We start the job with who we assume is the ‘client’, they send us ‘final text’, accept the visuals and we produce the finished artwork. We are told they are “just going to show their colleagues”, before returning with a whole new ball game.

The final text apparently wasn’t and “can we just slip in these four extra pages of A4″ (into a DL leaflet usually). The images they sent aren’t correct and one of their friends doesn’t like the pink corporate colour we were told we had to use. Worst still, they send something they’ve knocked-up in Office which they want us to recreate; complete with centred Times bold titles, ‘friendly’ Comic Sans body text and clipart bullet points.

Creating everything digitally should have been a time-saver but because people use word processors, they assume that it is just as easy to make changes to a piece of design. No matter if you just spent 4 hours shoe-horning text into place to get all the baselines aligning across the spread. Or, the PDF you sent as a low resolution visual gets forwarded to the printer who happily runs out a million, full-colour copies with 72dpi images pixelated to destruction.

Apple to the rescue

Far be it for an Apple fanboy to blab on about the maker of his computers… but it looks like they may have a solution to proofing problems. The next version of iChat, Apple’s Instant Messaging client, will have iChat Theater here. With it we will be able to work collaboratively, holding a conversation with our client while editing their document. They will be able to watch us in realtime without leaving their desk.

To a certain extent this can be done by turning a free-standing web cam towards the computer screen but Apple’s move to build cameras into the monitor has taken this away. Plus, many of our clients go into a flappy-handed tizzy at the thought of setting-up something new. They want the IT department to do it for them. iChat is so simple that we can talk them through completing three one-line address boxes.

Once iChat Theater is incorporated into applications, audio and video can be presented during an iChat cenference. Editing changes will be easy-peasy, our client will see their addition of a ‘word or two’ (as if it were) throws the whole document out and they will have to cut the crud elsewhere. Their damage will be right in front of them, as will the solutions we try before finding a work-around.

The one problem is that iChat Theater will only work with Cocoa applications and QuarkXPress is not one of these. This could be the spur for Quark to rewrite XPress if Adobe makes further in-roads into Quark’s one-time near monopoly. But then again, Adobe’s CS3 applications are hugely expensive, here, even for upgrades…