With the advent of a lot of the new technologies like touch interface, smart phones, tablet PCs, E-Ink etc… Many designers and modernists are having a hard time finding where print is coming into play. Why printers stay in business. What a lot of them don’t seem to realize is that the printing industry has got such a grasp on the world, that unless the final tree on this planet gets ripped from the ground, there will always be printing in one form or another. Drastic or no, there had to be some attention grabber.
There are several sides to me which I must bring up first, just to ensure that I am being fully honest an open with you:
- I am a print designer thru and thru. I started in the printing industry, I’ve worked on a press, the smell of a freshly printed editorial is my aphrodisiac, I love print.
- I am a huge advocate of new technologies. I have 5 computers in my house, I own an iPod (several versions), iPhone, but no iPad. I am extremely interested in seeing the new tablet PCs on the horizon and how they will effectively change the way I work (note the term change, it will be a repeating pattern), and once again the smell of new electronics sends me into a high that is not common enough for my addiction.
- I will be as brutally honest to both sides of “Print is Dead” and “Print will Never Die” sides as I can and welcome your input with open arms.
Print of our Past
I won’t go back and start getting into too much print history since if you are reading this, you’re most likely enough educated to know the origins of print. Wether you think it started with Gutenberg or you know about the original asian cultures linotypes, I won’t bore you with 14 paragraphs of bible printing, history. I’ll start however with the post modern advertising.
With the advent of the industrial age and manufacturing, printers had their future set in stone. Products that were being produced were creating what today would become the abundance of consumption. Aside from consumers ‘need’-ing (and I use that term very loosely) these new products, the products need the printing industry. From advertising to packaging, sales tools to instruction sheets, printing was a ‘need’ of the industrial era products. This meant that the more consumers ‘need’-ed productsm the more the products actually ‘need’-ed printing. The technology of the printing process evolved during this time more than any other. The speed, the coatings, the varying of processes, all of this although briefly experimented with earlier, never came into their own due to limitations. The requirement of the industrial era and financial backing of the the companies behind the products them allowed for these developments to come to fruition. Eye catching packaging and advertising brought four colour and spot colour printing into full production environments and quantities of products brought forth faster and more efficient printing processes. Without this era of need, it’s hard to see where the printing industry would be, but even harder to see would be that of the industry without printing. They are hand in hand joined. Without one, there is no conceivable way that we can imagine the other.
Although we no longer live in an industrial era, it’s evolved. Industrial became consumption and now it’s commonly considered that we’re in the information era verging on the social era. But with all of these varying mentalities of what generation we’re in, there is still one thing that remains the same. People still have the ‘needs’ that they did. I’m not saying the industrial era brought on this need, I only say that it commercialized it. And during this commercialization, brought forth the requirement for print. This requirement remains today. Between packaging, billboards, editorials, posters, collateral, etc… there doesn’t seem to be a way that the modern digital era can fully take over print.
Print of our Present
So where are we now? The present shows us the growing interactive technologies. Print hasn’t been laying down on the job. Developments in new printing technologies have been occurring over the past several years. Digital printing seems like an oxymoron to the lay person when spoken aloud, however the method of digital printing has allowed as great a leap in the technology as the printing plate did. The ability to generate near press, or in some cases higher then press quality using a digital press has given printers an ability to keep up with the new demand that is now happening. This demand is greater than ever. Take a look at any magazine rack in North America (send me to UK and I can check there too). You’ll find a far greater choice of publications then ever before. You’ll also find a far greater amount of products available on the consumer market that requires printing.
Sure, you’re seeing a change in the newspaper industry. A decline in production of it, but I wonder if that is because people are reading newspapers less or that they are too busy to sit and read anymore. I for one will fully admit, there are times where I struggle to get through my emails. The problem with the old method of thinking is that printing was for the masses. It is now not so. Consumers don’t want what common knowledge is out there, they want targeted information that is relevant to them.
On a recent flight from Toronto to San Francisco, I was given a choice of newspapers. I took one but held off on reading it, I was quick to think here because I knew this 6 hour flight would be a great opportunity for market research. So I put the paper on my lap, quickly skimmed through to find the business section (you must do that in business class for fear of becoming the outcast) and set out to spy on others with my eyes peaking over the top of the page. I had my suspicions but never thought it was this bad. Nearly every person I saw reading the paper were, get this, reading only the articles that were applicable and interesting to them. They were simply skipping over whole sections, ignoring hours of content creators work, not taking notice of the painstaking effort it took to ensure that the plates had been perfectly aligned for that professional photographer’s photo or illustrator’s design. Was it just me that could appreciate the time it takes to lay out the pages in spread, adjust the line height and typography to ensure for a perfect fit? Was it only I who planned on finding every case where there was time taken to adjust kerning to avoid widows and orphans? Then I remembered, of course it is. At least on this flight. We’re living in an information age, where the average consumer doesn’t notice the eccentricities that us designers have come to appreciate. Long past are the days where using a ligature was common practice and now thought of as a fanciful or over indulgence, at least in the public view. But that doesn’t mean that print is dying. It’s simply evolving.
Print designers can take solace in knowing that, at least from this mans view, a true typographer’s work is at it’s best when the reader doesn’t notice the type but rather reads the words. This applies to online more than press in many cases since in the beginning of the web culture, images and graphics were expensive in regards to load time. This is becoming the case yet again thanks to the restrictions placed on mobile devices and their distribution companies.
What this boils down to at least for the present is that print as a whole in the present is seeing a very large change from being the primary focus of many consumers as the main focus of their attention and resource for information, to a secondary format, or supplementary format, for information. Sure, there is an abundance of printing done for consumer products, a massive amount of more editorial content and an ever growing direct mail market (especially with the advent of dynamic printing) but each one of these cases, the quantity of printed material is greatly reduced. Printing is done on a much smaller scale, then what it used to be. Long gone, or least few and far between, are the runs of several million for editorials or advertisements. Incoming are the smaller runs of 20,000 – 30,000 for direct campaigns, or targeted runs, or 500,000 for the dynamic content brochure / information catalog. Printers are going to have to come to the realization that their print runs will be shorter. It’s the time between runs that will be an asset for a lot of the printers out there. Maintaining a press running non-stop will be a challenge for many of them but for those that can succeed in doing so, the outcome will result is more abundance than they have seen to date.
Print of the (foreseeable) Future
With tablet PCs, the iPad, mobile phones and e-Book readers, along with any new technologies on the horizon not yet released, the printing industry should be thrilled. With technologies like the new .issue file format coming in from Adobe, the HTML5 technology that allows interactive multimedia within content, the advances in computer vision (openCV) and augmented reality being closely taken a look at by many of the advertising agencies, QR and other forms of 2D barcodes for fast online interaction, you’d wonder why there aren’t more people jumping into the rollers of their presses, but you’d be mistaken. All, or at least most of these new engaging technology developments have roots and requirements in printing. Most of them require print as the instigator and utilitarian asset in order to perform the interactive elements. 2D barcodes for instance require a printed substance to be on. The technology doesn’t work well with television (to date) and would not make sense to use in the online interactive world since the same data could be utilized with a simple link.
The Adobe .issue file format is build and designed around the understanding that the .issue file format is developed for a strong tie between the print and interactive world. In many cases, the requirements behind the development of a digital version of the editorial content costs more in both resources along with time. Print products can be designed, printed, shipped and in peoples homes gar before the digital copy is complete This also applies to the HTML5 technology since it is similar in many regards. Even with publishers making the move to these new digital formats, the value of the printed product becomes higher since it is a rarity. Wired Magazine for instance has spoken about wanting to switch to a .issue format but raise the price of the printed product allowing for a more complex and engaging design. The reason being is because with the massive amounts of print requirements throughout their multitude of global printers, there is a lot of restriction on the printed product design for a specific price. With that lifted or raised, their printed product can incorporate more colours, new technologies, and have a higher value to the consumer who wants the tangible version.
With HTML5 and rss readers, we’ve seen a huge influx of users creating feeds that are targeted towards their interests. Twitter and Facebook have given consumers the ability to see the stories that their friends and colleagues are interested in, LinkedIn provides professionals the ability to create groups and interact with those in the same or similar fields to build ideas and get opinions on. With the future of newspapers up in the air, I would not be surprised if they took the more targeted route of allowing individuals to build their own papers and have them delivered where ever they are. Vacation? No problem, simply log into your account, say where you are, and if the hotel is part of a group of organizations within a syndicate, you can have the hard-copy at your door when you wake up, or if not you can receive your digital version and the printed version will not be delivered until you’re back. Prefer not to receive the week-day printed version but want the Saturday and Sunday. Done. The consumer deciding how they want to receive the content that is interesting to them, when, where and how they want. Newspapers can then use this information to price out and target their ads. Both sides of this have added value, higher control, and the information that will assist them in their needs.
Conclusion
There are a lot of ideas that are out their for printing in the future. Many of which revolve around integrating the digital realm with print. If printers can realize that the digital era that we seem to be on the brink of is not their enemy but rather that young and upcoming know-it-all that the boss likes and will most likely be running the company soon, then it will get along great. Understanding that print is not a dominant player in advertising and information anymore is what it really comes down to. Which brings me back to my original statement: “…unless the final tree on this planet gets ripped from the ground, there will always be printing in one form or another.” What this means is not that the printing industry is the be all and end all, but rather the instigator to everything. It is the outlet that will add value to many digital areas. It is the outlet that will allow transfer of information without the need for fear of file format, battery life, screen size, standards compatibility, spam filters, bandwidth, etc… Understanding this, I feel that myself as well as you who have read this, sees that print is not dead, print is very much alive. From what it seems to have thought was it’s end is simply it’s realization that it isn’t the be all and end all. Rather that it is the go to guy for when things need to get done and there is no room for error, is the guy that’s always well informed and ahead of the curve, it is the guy whose made the error all ready and has a solution for it, it is the experienced big brother that coaches you when you ask and provides insight at all the pivotal points in life.
