Digital Detox - Analogue Rehab

During late 2020 and the whole of 2021 I noticed a lot of Linked-In contacts (most of them designers) were rediscovering the joys of analogue techniques. In an increasingly digital professional environment, the tactile enjoyment of creating physical art seems to have gotten lost. Yet, off the clock, people seemed to be rediscovering the manual talents and techniques that probably attracted them to design in the first place and posting their artwork. I commonly use digital tools, and for some purposes they are very good, but I still prefer sketching on paper. Luckily, retirement has removed the pressure on me to work digitally but in industry it has become the norm.

I mainly associate digital workflow with design sketching, rendering and CAD modelling but when I’m writing I go straight to my keyboard without a second thought. I didn’t even consider this to be ‘digital’. But a few weeks ago, a strange thing happened. Some ideas came into my head and I wanted to do a bit of creative writing but rather than logging on, I simply grabbed a pen and paper. After years of writing student feedback in block capitals for legibility, I was shocked that my once quick and neat handwriting had become a terrible scrawl. But the content itself flowed freely and was clear and precise, needing hardly any editing when I later went to type it up.

It occurred to me that writing on the computer isn’t very enjoyable and takes me longer than it used to because I’m not a good typist. Spellchecking flatters my typing ability and I agonise over every word (and over the provenance of facts and quotes so I often head to Google mid-sentence). I constantly re-read and edit on the hoof because the technology allows me to but as result, I lose my flow and for me typing is less efficient. I usually end up with loads of draft versions of the same document with minor differences. It’s analogous to digital photography. In the days of film, having just 24 or 36 exposures forced you to choose the correct film speed for the conditions and then to compose each image ‘in camera’. Today we take hundreds of shots and edit them down to find the best before then cropping, adding filters, effects and Photoshop enhancements. Behind each Instagram masterpiece there are usually dozens of rejected photos.

Now I realise that writing on paper compels me to think carefully about the words and how they are used. The only safety net is double line spacing and the insert symbol (which looks like an inverted ‘V’) so I can put notes/corrections on the blank line between rows of text. I’m no stranger to the page margins either for major paragraph changes.

Another interesting observation. I actually wrote the draft of this article with a biro on paper (see cover image) and within less than 500 words my scrawly handwriting improved as my muscle memory kicked in. By the end it was nearly as good as it used to be and with practice should fully recover.

Naturally the digital tools I use in my design workflow offer lots of productivity advantages. But at the idea sketching stage they don’t feel as creative as analogue methods. For me, hand drawing on paper has a spontaneity and provides a quick and direct connection from my mind’s eye to a physical externalized image that even a tablet or pen display doesn’t give me. I do feel pressure to get each sketch right first time but that doesn’t mean it has to be perfect. To quote the adage ‘perfection is the enemy of the good’.

Clearly, typing my own material directly has had a detrimental effect on me during the writing process. I recently found a box of old handouts from when I first began teaching about 30 years ago which I decided to scan so I could bin the originals. Back then we had typists to transcribe handwritten notes into handout masters. To my surprise the teaching content was really clear and concise which is a big consideration when someone else is doing your typing and handouts were physically printed in the hundreds. Fewer words equated to less pages to type and print, keeping costs down and saving my precious time.

When I compared these old hand-drafted notes to handouts which I typed myself towards the end of my career for online distribution, the latter were much wordier but the newer material was worse for its verbosity, especially for an audience comprising many more students with English as a second language. My old concise material was far superior as a direct result of the analogue nature of its creation.

Finally I feel that I can now identify as an analogue tourist rather than a digital native. I take vacations in the digital world when I need to, but I still enjoy coming home to analogue. I sketch and write better using biro and paper because they are unforgiving media without an ’undo’ button. I don’t have the distracting facility to edit ‘on the hoof’ so I have to really consider the images that I generate and the words the that I compose.

After years spent writing perhaps hundreds of thousands of words I’ve come to conclude that I still find analogue quicker. The inability to edit as I go along means that I just get on with the creation of ideas without striving for grammatical perfection. Editing, refinement and fact-checking can come later when I do move to the screen. Of course, I have to use digital tools for the final artifacts but if the quality of the analogue input is better, it follows that the finished digital output will be better too and definitely more concise!

Which brings me nicely to some 2022 resolutions.

First, I have a lot of writing to catch up on in the new year so I’m going to revert to first drafts on paper. This will force me to be more considered and concise from the outset and should deliver better material at the end.

Second, I’m going to refresh my YouTube channel ‘Learning Design’ which I’ve neglected for much of 2021. Surprisingly the most watched session was a simple, totally analogue, marker and pastel car rendering demonstration without any Photoshop (see cover image) which tends to suggest that my viewers recognise the ‘marks’ used to create the image are more important than the tools creating the marks. I was always a good at marker rendering, so I’ll definitely be producing more analogue demonstrations in future.

Third and most importantly I’m going to take a month’s ‘digital detox’ with a break from social media. I’m spending too much unproductive time on Facebook and LinkedIn. Even a few minutes here and there quickly adds up. Whenever I log on to my computer, I first spend at least 10 minutes checking FB and LI, even longer if I’m drawn into interesting threads. It’s so easy to waste 20-30 minutes before getting on with my intended task and I’m doing it more often even though I am usually quite disciplined.

So, from Friday 7 January 2022 I’m going to deactivate/hibernate my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. It won’t be permanent, and I plan to log back in sometime in February. But after 12 and 11 years respectively on both platforms I really need a time out and a bit of social media silence.

Happy New Year and have a great January! I’ll see you the other side of my analogue sojourn.