Thing is, even if I did use my job title, most people would still be none the wiser. Not that this is a problem exclusive to artwork. I mean, what does a ‘Senior Producer’ actually produce? Apologies to producers both senior and junior for that one. Keep producing. Anyway, this post is about why artworkers are called artworkers.
I’ll wager that the difference between artwork and other roles with mysterious titles in this shameful world of marketing and design is that I’m not convinced your average artworker’s colleagues can describe what it is they do.
“What’s Kirk up to at the moment?”
“Oh, he’s artworking the new Cheesy Peas FSDU for me”
“What’s he doing after that?”
“…er, artworking me a cup of tea”
The accepted definition for an artworker is something along the lines of tidying up an existing design and preparing it for the printing process. I’ve been producing artwork for litho printing for the past twenty years and there ain’t nothing like it, but you can count yourself lucky if you’re doing anything more than emailing a hi-res PDF of a 4pp flyer to a 24-hour turnaround digital printer these days. Yawn. So what are we doing if we’re not preparing a job for print then? Interactive PDFs are quite popular at the moment. There’s always some correctional retouching (“can you take all the scaffolding off that building? We’re trying to sell it”) and for the masochists among us, the back end of an annual report. Artworking is a bit like cooking I think, in that it’s an adjective that covers loads of different tasks, but unlike cooking, you can’t eat a pop-up banner (did you know the first 200mm of those things aren’t printed on?)
If we didn’t have to be called something at all, I would bin the word. If you’re an artworker who’s been asked to knock out some after effects, you’ve got your motion designer hat on. If you’re tickling out that scaffolding, you’re a retoucher. If you’re typesetting an annual report, as I said before, you’re a masochist.
I once put together a spreadsheet that detailed as many artworker jobs as I could possibly conceive of doing in a property marketing agency, and not once did I use the term artwork. Why ‘artwork’ something? Just tell client services what you’re doing. You’re retouching. You’re checking if the brochure matches the print spec. You’re proofreading. The introduction of a traffic manager at the agency I once worked at resulted in the artwork team being unofficially responsible for binding people’s presentation printouts ahead of client meetings. Yes, someone needs to do it but why on earth should that always fall to one particular person, who hasn’t necessarily shown themselves to be particularly skilled at it anyway?
I fully understand that everyone has to do things at work that are not strictly in their remit. I willingly took over basic maintenance of the coffee machine at one place for instance. What I’m suggesting is that what we commonly call an artworker is the person most likely to have to take on those things. IT? Of course. Powerpoint? Certainly. This doesn’t have to be understood as negative, more that artwork is just not a thing anymore.
Let’s break the word down. Art worker. Worker. That works for me. Come the revolution we’ll be last up against the wall.
Of course I’d rather be called an Artworker than a Mac Operator, a pretty blunt term that’s died out now. I bet Mac Operators didn’t have to do other people’s ring binding for them though.
This article prompted me to write this post:
you are not special 