I definitely get this often vibe that: somewhat comparable things that take a lot more time often end up a lot better than things that take less time. It's like that commitment you make when you're doing something like this, the amount of effort, care and focus that must be exhibited to finish something like this document.

We should definitely reflect on that a lot.

This is also a catalouge to sell products in an era where producing them is expensive and you can't easily change it after the fact.

Its quite a different situation compared to your average clickbait.

People are more careful when you really only have one shot to make a good impression and you can't (cheaply) redo stuff if you mess it up.

Ironically with glass itself, it's the ones that take less time that tend to be better.

Especially any borosilicate glass with a hard edge

I had the same thought but I also wonder if these highly trained illustrators were happy with making corporate renderings or if they had imagined themselves working in a more creative capacity?

I also don't think its gone. We still have great illustrators but someone somewhere has to decide to use illustrations instead of a photo, CGI, or something else and then they have to pay the premium for that service.

I know nothing about the industry let alone in the era, but I imagine 'drawing glassware for Pyrex catalogue' wasn't a full-time job - but either a temporary contract, or just one project for an agency. So you might view it as an opportunity to perfect your drawing of glass, or just a boring gig but paying the bills.

If you reflect on your own profession & career though... Well, rather than speak for you, I too 'had imagined [myself] working in a more [x] capacity'!

Who says they're not also being more creative elsewhere?

Plus wouldn't it be a sense of creative pride knowing that you can create an illustration that perfectly depicts refraction through glass, such that people find it hard to differentiate it from a photo? (which did exist in 1938)

To you second paragraph, the output of a CAD model is often used for line art of a product, and sometimes for an illustrated parts breakdown.

The quality of layouting and print publications dropped off long long before AI slop became a thing. Already in the 80s it was mostly lost.

My heuristic is that quality is largely a function of human attention during creation. The transition to digital layouting etc meant less human attention could be spent on it while still achieving “acceptable” results, and so market dynamics ensured that less attention was spent on those tasks, lowering quality.

Whether or not you personally would make this cost/quality tradeoff comes down to the individual, but to me it is also quite clear that something was lost in the transition.

I think another thing is a lot of modern stuff is under thought, either in trying to be overly broad or just misunderstanding the user.

Google Shopping is an example. It has enforced opinions about what a product looks like, so you have to force a square peg through a round hole.

They’ve got a lot of stuff about pricing and loyalty and quantities, but if you dig into tons of categories they have almost nothing that represents the real categories sellers and buyers care about.

Look at the collectibles category. If you sell Pokémon cards and collectibles there is zero merchandising info that actually matches your products or how they’re sold.

That means your analytics, automatic listings, ads, etc. are too generic for your customers. All your automated stuff is going to come through wrong.

Meanwhile niche and deep sellers who avoid that forced genericisation, like McMaster-Carr[1] can have these incredibly valuable, useful, and compelling catalogs.

I’d say that deep user knowledge is why Aperture had such a strong fan base too.

I struggle with this buying from Lee Valley. Their caralogs are fantastic, but I have trouble finding things on their website.

This turned into a rant, but maybe a TL;DR is a lot of modern software has no skin in the game of specialization, and so they inadvertently limit these experiences.

[1] mcmaster.com

Totally agreed. And as the sibling comment points out, it started before AI slop became a thing. I think it's because technological progress in typesetting means you don't have to "care" as much (it is automatic). Of course as a result, this means modern typesetting is "careless".

Extend this metaphor however you please.