It appears almost absurd to think that at one time, and not so long ago, we did business almost exclusively by telex and fax.

If you were fortunate to have experienced this in a high street environment, you would really not #connect with the significance of living on an island with 110,000 people, one telephone company, a home and business ‘up country’, a Tandy fax machine (bought from a local franchise of Radio Shack) and the realization that the first time I sent a fax to China, as I was watching the printed paper feeding in, someone in Beijing was watching it come out.  This was earth shattering!

Technology at that moment could not get any more advanced – this was cutting edge!  Eighteen months later my Gateway 486 was hooked up to a new email account!

At that time I was traveling to many of the islands of the Eastern #Caribbean as a #design and advertising consultant for a regional development bank, assisting small businesses.  Everything was by hand, on site.  Finished presentations were painstakingly created at my office on the trusty Gateway.  It was truly roughs by coffee break, finished work by lunchtime!

Then storage became king.

We were sending zip disks to printers.  Creating combos of low resolution photography and high res graphics, then outputting the #image to a high resolution dye sublimation printer, so that the image could be drum scanned and digitized, to be printed high res, full colour!  The bends and twists which a small group of regional designers went through,just to get the work out!  This was truly an education.

Now we create, send mockups, proofs and send finals for production, anywhere; from the desktop.  Same day, same hour, same minute.  The joy of that first fax has never left me.  It just evolved.

And those long nights in hotel rooms, creating presentations by hand.  Finish 6 am with a meeting at 9!  They taught me to be grateful for change, delight in giving clients my best work, quietly proud that all of those tough years led to the simple confidence of knowing when it’s right and #content to watch really good #ideas fly.

If more technology comes, and it will,  I may well draw the line at telling the machine what to do and watching it do it.  The joy is always steeped in a relationship with the client, the ideas and the outcomes in hopefully equal measure.  There’s no app for that.