About

A blog about the onset of digital design technology. This is the home for my in-progress writing and research.

About the Project

The phrase “What you see is what you get,” was a popular shorthand in the desktop publishing industry of the late 1980s. WYSIWYG, for short, described a technological dream: Imagine an interactive graphic display which would allow you to see print-quality previews of in-progress work on your computer screen. Imagine that it would display a wide gamut of print-accurate colors. WYSIWYG systems were the north star for software and hardware developers including Adobe, Aldus, Corel, and Apple.

Today, WYSIWYG systems are integral to digital creative labor. Illustrators can sketch, paint, color, ink, and print from a single program. Popular histories of desktop publishing treat the development of WYSIWYG systems as an inevitable, democratizing force: a design tool that anyone can use. My writing repositions WYSIWYG as an epistemology which structures and reproduces the current precarities of creative labor. Far from being inevitable, the specific decisions of software and hardware developers enclosed the field of illustration, de-skilled practitioners, and formed a post-capitalist relations of production — one in which what you see is what you get and what you get is what you see.

About the Blog

My intention is to use in-progress writing to support in-progress coding. In the late 1980's, graphic markup languages like SGML were posed in opposition to more user-friendly programs like PageMaker and user-first systems like MacOS. My hope in building this blog myself is both to refresh some skills and to revive some of the promise of graphic markup. In other words, expect some broken code :)

The site was built using Jekyll and hosted on GitPages.