It's the tail end of the Nifty Fifties—and I am twelve. My hometown of Metuchen, New Jersey is an antebellum bedroom community for the metropolis of New York. We never lock our doors and my mother rarely knows where her kids are, except at suppertime (SPAM or Velveeta cheese and elbow macaroni, Baked Alaska for dessert—yum!). Everything's changing; you can feel it! We're so modern with our 17" black-and-white RCA TV with three networks to choose from. On Sunday evenings, our family watches The Ed Sullivan Show. But Pop warns us kids to first "hotten up the tube" because it takes awhile 'til the CBS Eye comes into focus.

We don't need a telephone operator to place our calls anymore; we can dial directly anywhere in the USA! You can hear the Soviet's satellite Sputnik overhead if your radio is tuned to the right frequency, and soon there will be a man in space but he will be Russian, not American. Although we're really most nervous since the Ruskies now have the bomb: The Cold War is on and it is freezing! General Dwight D. Eisenhower is our 34th President and, boy, do 'We like Ike!'

America just weathered a recession and the Dow Jones has shot up over 600 for the first time ever. My little sister got Eloise for Christmas, a book illustrated by Hilary Knight for "precocious adults"—about a little girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel. We have a Chevy Impala one of the hottest cars on the road: Just look at those fins! Pop, in suit and tie, takes the train to Rockefeller Center each weekday, brings home the New York Times each evening (cost: five cents). In the lobby of the Forum Theatre on Main Street, I can't help but stare at the bold, abstract poster for Otto Preminger's newest movie Anatomy of a Murder, designed by Hollywood commercial artist Saul Bass who designed the film's titles too. It's so different looking! And a new magazine called The Journal of Commercial Art just launched in California.

Fast-forward 50 years. Who knew we would all become multitaskers: connected to technology each and every waking moment, unable to function without our iPhones, WiFi, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Netflix, Skype, Twitter, Photoshop, eBay, iTunes, Tivo, 40" Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) televisions with 2,000 stations, computer-run shavers, cameras and hybrid cars (although the American auto industry, one of the few remaining major manufacturing industries left in the U.S., is tanking)? We know where our kids are each and every minute of the day: Only after we punch in the code in our ADT security systems may we all go to bed. The operators we're talking to on our cell phones are in Mumbai (in 1959, Bombay).

Recent innovations like the VCR, pager and fax machine have already become obsolete. And some inventions never saw the light of day—like the vacuum cleaner that would have run on nuclear energy.

The Journal of Commercial Art became Communication Arts, CA for short, in response to a changing profession. Saul Bass would be considered a graphic designer, were he still with us. And designers are often considered "exotic menials"¹ since design is largely undervalued. American Institute of Graphic Arts, in the struggle to redefine and rebrand itself, unable to make a major change to its name, and so has become just AIGA.

The environment is collapsing. The market has plunged from its record high of nearly 14,000. The U.S economy is in a deepening recession. And a new war, one with no apparent end, is on-the war on terrorism. African-American Barack Hussein Obama, at 47, is our 44th president. He talks to us weekly via the Internet. We can respond online with our ideas: He wants to know what we think. More change is in the air; change we must believe in.

CA: REFLECTIONS OF CHANGE
A flipbook of the intervening half-century of CA annuals confirms that the communication arts (photography, illustration, design, advertising) provides us with mirror images of our world: An America shaped by Civil Rights struggles and gains; political assassinations and disgraces; the tragedies of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars; the exhilaration of the Space Race; the fall of the USSR; mini skirts, go-go boots, tattoos and body piercings; Woodstock and the Summer of Love; eruptive markets and horrific natural disasters.

And in the last 50 years America has itself become increasingly more diverse in its work force. We have seen a massive sophistication and general awareness of our design, photography and illustration techniques, technology and styles. Design, and its component parts, has emerged from obscurity to enter the lexicon of the layman. There has been a huge change in the complexion of the communication arts professions; it's morphed from a cosmopolitan, larger-than-life, white male monopoly into a diverse tapestry of talent, gender and ethnicity woven across our entire country, for richer or poorer, for better or worse.