In the winter of 1877, a 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell tried to sell the patent for his newly-discovered telephone to Western Union for a mere $100,000. At the time, Western Union held a near monopoly on the profitable and expanding telegram business and was one of the biggest corporations in the world. The executives at the company considered Bell's offer, but they politely passed because, they explained, they were in the telegram business not the telephone business.

As any business school professor will tell you, it was a error of colossal proportions, all because the executives at Western Union failed to understand they were in the communications business, and the telegraph was just a passing technology.

Misunderstood Format
Which brings us to Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format. Many designers have a love/hate relationship with this 800-pound gorilla. It's a great tool for disseminating information and improving team productivity, but, goes the conventional wisdom, it has undercut business for designers, simply because it allows non-designers to reuse content design and take control of many content management duties. A recent TrendWatch Graphic Arts study, which I wrote about in my last column, more or less confirms this.

This conventional wisdom is, indeed, true if you see yourself as a graphic designer in the business of page layout, Web design, and identity creation. But if you see yourself as an information designer, then PDF isn't so threatening.

In fact, some would argue that PDF and other dynamic content technologies represent the next big opportunity for creative professionals.

"Because Acrobat is different from most other Adobe applications, which are built for artists and designers, it has not been embraced as a designer's tool in schools and art departments. There is a large community of designers out there that still does not understand Acrobat as an application and PDF as a format," said Jeffrey Warnock, a project manager for the Adobe Press division of Adobe Systems.

As a result, designers haven't begun to understand the tremendous business potential of PDF and the slew of aftermarket PDF conversion and development tools.

"Although many [designers] have been creating PDF files, they probably have not fully embraced the post-production tools available to them, both in terms of learning the tools and in marketing their services around it." said Warnock.

Such transitions are never easy. In the '80s, for example, as DTP publishing became a reality, it took designers some time to understand and create collateral material directly on their computers. In the '90s, when the Web exploded, many of those same designers were forced to learn new skills, such as HTML, RGB output, navigational and interface design.

Today, a similar transformation is underway. "Today's technology shift is still around networks, but the move is toward the development of communication infrastructures through 'smart' formats and server-based technologies that make content and information reusable and available between workgroups," said Warnock.

Niches Abound
How would your business differ if you understood and actively communicated to your current and potential clients the benefits of:

• electronic forms creation;

• interactive and multimedia ebooks and documents;
• incorporating tagged and structured information into documents;
• "accessible" PDF file creation (making PDF files that address criteria of Section 508);
• electronic alternatives to paper-based workflows.

Granted "electronic alternatives to paper-based workflows" isn't as alluring a task as "creating a new brand," but neither was the prospect of snapping a line in Quark to those still working with a T-square.

"There is an opportunity for designers to fill the gap between the traditional visual graphic design work and the newer corporate information-based design work that is escalating today. This type of informational design is becoming more and more significant and may be a complementary skill to those already designing for page-layout," said Warnock.

Thankfully, there will always be a place for page layout, identity creation, Web development, and other traditional design jobs. But the most successful designers will be the ones who understand that, 124 years after Western Union's blunder, the communications business still waits for no one.

Finding Resources
If you're interested in learning more about the professional opportunities that PDF offers, try one of the many good books on the subject, including "Real World PDF with Adobe Acrobat 5" by our very own Anita Dennis and Tricia Gellman; "Adobe Acrobat 5 Master Class" by Pattie Belle Hastings, Bjorn Akelsen, and Sandee Cohen; and "Creating Adobe Acrobat Forms" by John Deubert. Any one of these books will get you started.

Read more by Eric J. Adams.