Adobe  appointments 
Inspire 04, held last Friday as an official event of Sydney Design Week, brought together minds from across a range of design media for an informative day of seminars at Sydney’s iconic Powerhouse Museum. Compered by Garry Knespal, Graphic Arts Services Association of Australia (GASAA) executive secretary, the seminars included print, film, television, digital and online design discussions as well as a number of hands-on sessions and troubleshooting forums.

Craig Tegel, Adobe Asia Pacific managing director, Mark Pesce from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and industry identity Andy McCourt got proceedings underway by all tackling the question "What makes great design?" in their own inimitable fashion.

According to Tegel, great design comes down to three factors: elegance, functionality and foresight, and he says that these factors are a tenant of Adobe’s philosophy when developing functional design software. He says developing such software has become increasingly painstaking as creatives look to publish their designs across a variety of mediums while facing shortened turnaround times and an explosion of available mediums.

Pesce sees great design as something that can take the growing sea of information available in the 21st Century and present it in such a way as to enable consumers to easily make informed choices.

"We are in an informationally saturated world, where all information has been reduced to [digital] bits, but this has created a problem. There is so much information out there and consumers are faced with hard choices when it comes to choosing what messages they want to listen to, and it can’t all be done at once," says Pesce.

McCourt’s message was similar: great design equals great communication. He believes that over the next five to ten years, society’s information will only get more complex – verbally, textually and pictorially. He believes that despite the growing litany of digital communication methods, print will remain as a core element of communication.

"Paper remains a culturally ingrained, trusted, efficient, durable conveyer of information, growing from a large base at two to four per cent per year. However, non-print mediums are growing from a smaller base but at a higher speed, at 15 per cent per year," McCourt says.