The Impact the iPad has had on the Design Industry

The iPad has had a huge impact upon the design industry, it has opened up a huge amount of
opportunities from a designer's perspective. The new format provides a variety of design jobs for a
graphic designer, illustrator, animator and pretty much every other job in this industry as well as many
other industries.

In the (so far) short life of the iPad it has already seen magazines redesigned especially for the format
and eBooks which been animated or been made interactive. An ‘app’ to view comics has also been
created with users able to download comics and flick through the pages or view each comic panel by panel like a slide show.

I think that creating something for the iPad for my final major project would be an extremely current subject or theme, as the brief asks us to choose something that is industry based but will inform your work and perhaps stir you into a direction that you wish to work in after graduating. The tablet market is really starting to grow and I think that it is likely that there will be a lot of work available here for the next few years.

As an illustrator I think the prospect is exciting because it gives me the chance to expand my skill base and I think that illustrators in this day and age do not need to be labelled as having one fixed method with one skill. Illustration is a lot more diverse and recently it can is involved in a variety of contexts, which gives us a lot more room to work in unusual styles. For example, a lot of my work is three dimensional and I work with a lot of photography and theatrical sets. I think my working method lends itself well to the iPad, perhaps because of the three dimensional aspect. It may be possible to rotate my models 360 degrees like some of the online magazines do when they are advertising products or displaying an item.