Graphic democracy at NCGA; ordinary people do design, production - National Computer Graphics Association, includes related article on Ansi's CGM standard

Software Magazine, May, 1988 by Robert Knight

Graphic Democracy at NCGA

As with so many other forms of computer technology, the leavening hand of democracy is having an effect on computer graphics and taking its toll. Power accrues to the end user, and that promises to spell doom not only for vendors of hard-to-learn systems, but to graphic artists and production people at the low end of the marketplace.

Now computer graphics technology, and its user access, might very well change the way people do business. Only a couple of years ago, computer graphics' cousin, desktop publishing, began doing the same thing to the typesetting industry. All it took was a microcomputer and a laser printer to produce manuals, newsletters, presentations, even football pools, whatever a corporation or government agency needed that didn't require a great deal of slick. Back then they couldn't do it in color; though. But they didn't need it, not for most applications. The marketer developing a sales presentation, the engineer publishing the specs of a prototype, the middle manager presenting an idea to top management no longer needed professional typesetting.

Soon many traditional type houses were faced with a decision: stick with low-end, high-volume projects like catalogs; go for the superquality high end of the market, which had been dominated by typographic "boutiques"; offer instant print services to the masses or get out of the business. Not that there's no room left for the professional.

Most sales presentations, business-to-business or consumer, still require a professional touch. So do many presentations before corporate boards. And that massive consumer of creative resources, the annual report, still dresses with the aid of professional tailors.

MORE IS IN COLOR

Now, however, software is becoming available that claims the fringes of the professional look. And it's in color.

A trip down an aisle of the recent National Computer Graphics Association conventin in Anaheim produced the brilliant visual noise the observer expects at such a place; NCGA is splashy and gee whiz by definition. But for once, it wasn't all WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

This year, the newsworthy stuff wasn't so much what was on the floor as who it was for. At the low level, the maturing of inexpensive PC-based systems like Harvard Graphics from Software Publishing Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., and Freelance Plus from Lotus Development Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., turn ordinary business people into not just typographers, but designers and producers of full color graphics, on screens and overheads, even from hardcopy printers.

As the result of a joint agreement with Autographix of Waltham, Mass., Software Publishing plans to join companies offering computer-generated color graphics on 35mm slides s well, all within 24 hours of sending a chart by mail or modem. Such systems produce graphics bereft of the "jaggies" that characterize the edges of so many computer graphics; and it makes it hard to do bad design, even if you're not a designer.

Although the products weren't demonstrated at the NCGA show, a Chicago company, MacroMind Inc., has introduced two utilities to provide graphics manipulation inside the Apple Macintosh Hypercard, sort of an instant access database. Based on MacroMind's VideoWorks II animation product, the utilities, HyperCard Driver and Accelerator, make HyperCard easier to work with and give animation more of a professinal look.

At the mid-range are vendors like Computer Associates International Inc. ( which acquired Issco), and Pansophic Systems Inc. of Oak Brook, Ill.

Pansophic's StudioWorks performs the same sort of graphics functions as Harvard Graphics or Freelance, plus video animation and 3D capabilities, in a single package. But the package is a turnkey graphics workstation, including not only software, but 80286- and 80386-based PC hardware.

CA HAS VARIETY

CA's product array is its strongest sales point. The division's products play in Fortran and Cobol, on IBM, DEC, Sun, Apollo and PC environments, for end users as well as graphic artists.

Its newly released CA-Graphics Connection acts as a graphics "translator" by importing graphics-producing applications such as spreadsheets, word processing, decision support, CAD/CAM, mapping and electronic publishing.

CA-Graphics squeezes the applications through picture formats from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, the Ansi standard CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile) and CA itself, and sends them to support as many as 26 mainframe, mini and micro graphics products including Harvard Graphics and Freelance Plus.

The high end of the marketplace still finds room for the graphics professional.

Turnkey systems from companies like the Los Angeles-based graphics division of Symbolics Inc. of Cambridge, provide high-resolution image processing, "paint" and animation systems that appeal to scientists as well as artists.

For the users attending the NCGA show, the message was clear. They are on their way toward controlling yet another segment of the information processing industry. (place hollow box)