18Dec/090

The “Good Enough” Revolution

Here is a New York Times blog posting that a friend of mine sent me. We were having a conversation about "quality of work" nowadays and how in the past couple decades the technology has gotten better, but the actual finished product in many cases leaves something to be desired. Seems that even our clients are OK with this. Hard for a couple of guys who built their careers on producing high quality work to swallow. My friend is a video producer and of course with me I see it in the printed pieces I work on.

Years ago, I could never image "resing-up" as many images as I do these days. Speed on turnaround times has forced many of our printers to go the digital route and I have admittedly OKed PDF proofs sent via email with mixed results in this scenario. This could encompass any type of industry you can imagine. Well, it's at least refreshing to know that others on the same page are taking notice of this phenomenon too. Just knowing that helps me restore a little faith in the human race, but not much.

Come to think of it, the clients these days may not even know what good quality is. Read the article below:

Good Enough is the New Great

"Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere," Robert Capps of Wired magazine wrote this summer in an essay called "The Good-Enough Revolution." Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, "ease of use, continuous availability and low price" are more important.

High-definition televisions have turned every living room into a home cinema, yet millions of us choose to watch small, blurry videos on our computers and our mobile devices. Cameras capture images in a dozen megapixels, yet Flickr is filled with snapshots taken with phone cameras that we can neither focus nor zoom. And at war, a country that has a fleet of F-16 fighter jets that can cover 1,500 miles an hour is now using more and more remote-controlled Predator drones that are powered by snowmobile engines.

Lo-fi solutions are now available for a range of problems that couldn't be solved with high-tech tools. Music played from a compact disc is of higher quality than what comes out of an iPod — but you can't easily carry 4,000 CDs with you on the subway or to the gym. Similarly, a professional television camera will produce a higher-quality image than a phone, but when something important happens, from the landing of a jet on the Hudson River to the murder of an Iranian protester, and there are no TV cameras around, images recorded on phones are good enough.

In February, a music professor at Stanford, Jonathan Berger, revealed that he has found evidence that younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones. For six years, Berger played different versions of the same rock songs to his students and asked them to say which ones they liked best. Each year, more students said that they liked what they heard from MP3s better than what came from CDs. To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great. ROBERT MACKEY

Grumpy Old Man Production Artist Rants from the old man, sitting in the corner, cursing under his breath.

The “Good Enough” Revolution

Good Enough is the New Great

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