Something With Screens

At some point "something with computers" stopped being a vague non-answer and became an embarrassment of genuine choices. The digital industry now contains multitudes: game designers, VR engineers, creative coders, UX researchers, motion designers, systems architects—each discipline with its own culture, its own temperament, its own way of consuming your brain over time. The umbrella term does none of them justice.

Code+Design is a free magazine that tries to map this territory for people figuring out which corner of it they belong in. Interviews with developers and designers who’ve built actual careers across the field, profiles of studios currently looking for people, enough breadth that someone genuinely uncertain about direction might get a feel for what each path looks like from inside. Half of it is advertising, which is the trade-off for free, but the editorial earns its space.

What I find more interesting than the career advice itself—which dates quickly—is what publications like this reveal about an industry at a given moment. In late 2016, VR is still being described as the imminent revolution, creative coding is being elevated to a legitimate design discipline rather than an eccentric sideline, and the startup trajectory is being presented with a romance that will look either prescient or delusional depending on when it’s read. Trade publishing as accidental time capsule.

The PDF is available free—and the snapshot of the industry describing itself at this particular moment is worth as much as the career guidance, probably more.