From the lovely new publication A Brief Message comes a, eh, brief message on the bleak future of print written by Steve Heller. Please go read all two-hundred words, I'll wait (and you really need to go check out what Khoi and Ms. Danzico have created, it's simply tres chic).
Now I know I don't work in the print industry but I am a huge consumer of printed products (newspapers, periodicals and books) and I have a hard time understanding all the hub-bub over whether this medium is dying or not. Maybe if I showed you my yearly budget for acquiring print material you would understand. Still what's all this hoo-ha about?
Are persons who work with print afraid that one day they'll come to work and find the doors locked and a sign that reads: "Sorry we're closed indefinitely because print died in its sleep last night"? Do print designers huddle in corners nervously smoking cigarettes and say things like, "five more issues, maybe, maybe a sixth, and then that's it, I'm out, because there is no way print can live much longer and I'll be damned if I'm going down with the ship."
In his essay Steve makes a point that print is no longer the preferred medium of reaching the most amount of people but that's nothing new. Print has taken a back seat to television as the primary tool for reaching the masses for decades. So why does this conversation loom as if one day we'll have print and the next we won't? It's as if there is this giant fear that this will all end with thousands of designers homeless, hungry, and roaming the streets, where they will offer to kern type for a spare change or provide color corrections for food.
Call it a hunch but something tells me that's not gonna happen any time soon. So buck-up little print designer, I seriously doubt your medium will go Dodo in my lifetime or yours. Get back to Quark and keep on keepin' on, my wallet is at that ready.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
If print dies, who prints the death certificate?
There won't be one, just a small footnote on it's facebook page and a blinking pink banner ad over on it's myspace page.
Paperless office. How well is that going, again?
Print, as I see it, is far from dead - at worst, it will turn like many other technologies presumed dead by the masses at this time: Into a niche market.
There is still a lot of demand for coffee table-type books. Specialty magazines. Catering to specific audiences is key not only in print but on just about every business thriving to survive and stay relevant. Sure, the market won't be as big, and competition will be much fiercer for an even smaller set of eyeballs, but it will still be there. Written/printed communication is as old as mankind itself, there's no reason to sing swan songs to it.
> Paperless office. How well is that going, again?
I'll send you the memo.
I have a hard time believing print will ever truly die. It's definitely fading in significance in a lot of ways, but there will always be a subculture of people who will print zines, posters, books and pretty much anything we're already used to.
A troubling sign for the print industry, at least here in Toronto is that there's apparently now only 2 shops that do spot UV varnishes as I discovered this morning. And I only know of one letterpress shop although I suspect there's probably a couple more hiding somewhere.
Print won't die, but in the realm of commercial print design, it's certainly shrunk. Take Annual Reports. This was once the mainstay of many a design firm's gigs but over the past several years, these, for the most part, have migrated online aside from the quick-and-dirty financial statement typically slapped onto newsprint.
Direct Mail? Well, it's still there, but I bet a lot of budgets are moving over to targeted email campaigns.
While you may certainly read a lot of newspapers, that, too, has been in a long steady decline as the demand for print advertising has also shrank...especially in the realm of classified ads.
The industry may not be dying, but it's certainly being shaken up a bit.
> So why does this conversation loom as if one day we'll have print and the next we won't?
Because one day we'll have desktop apps and the next, all applications will be "100% online", accessible via your web browsing client of choice (except your client of choice).
Sarcasm aside... "yep".
Greg you had a typo. "Quark" is correctly spelled now as "InDesign."
Print is like, sooo ungreen, and thats like, soo un-cool at the moment - that's why it will die, environmentalists will kill it.
> Direct Mail? Well, it's still there, but I bet a lot of budgets are moving over to targeted email campaigns.
I'm not so sure about that... My company still relies heavily on printed pieces because of the demographic (old folks!) We, the web team, are still the bastard children, despite having been able to prove ourselves quite capable of generating a lot of money with very little overhead.
A lot of direct mail companies are probably operating in a similar manner--the internet in a state of flux as far as their target market is concerned (or so they think--I think most marketing depts heads are just rectally impacted). I know from experience that print-reliant direct mail houses don't do HTML so well... They tend to be so deep in their rut they think it's a groove (that's a quote, I just don't know who). Get on some mailing lists and you'll see what I mean (to be fair, malicious spam makes email marketing a far more difficult task than for standard junk mail)...
Greg, you have an "itso" in paragraph 3.
http://daringfireball.net/2007/08/itso
from cuneiform to tablets to gutenberg to letterpress and beyound.... folks like to hold their information in a way that does not depend on electricity... hence environmentalists WON"T be able to kill it. burning megawatts is sooooo un-green ;-)
> Greg, you have an "itso" in paragraph 3.
Thank's. *wink*
Judging from my friends in the 20-somethings, I would label the first victim of the endangered print medium as the Newspaper... I don't believe one friend of mine has a subscription... and we are all at least reasonably informed through NPR and the Internet.
I do enjoy the Express versions of the city paper, available when you take the subway (or the DC metro)... My iPhone's connection dies underground ;)
> Greg you had a typo. "Quark" is correctly spelled now as "InDesign."
Truth. I second that.
Print? Dead?
Wasn't that the catch-cry when the new-world-order fortold of the paper-less office?
Or when the little boxes with moving-shades-of-grey pictures arrived in our living rooms?
Or when those hulking great Bakelite appliances arrived with something called 'radio' sqwarking out of them?
Or even when manual typesetting was retired in favour of faster methods..
Print can't die. It's still a core part of the way we communicate.
I am waiting for Print 2.0
Go ask your friendly neighborhood commercial printer if their business is dying, and most will tell you they're barely hanging on. Quantities are lower, digital goods are killing packaging (good riddence), newspapers are dying fast as advertisers are staying away, and magazines are next. Sure, some will survive, but a much smaller, redefined hardy bunch. In ten years 9 out of every 10 mom-and-pop neighborhood printer will be gone (like the record store down the corner), the newstand will be gone, and the print-only designer will be commanding as much market attention as a linotype operator.
> Go ask your friendly neighborhood commercial printer if their business is dying, and most will tell you they're barely hanging on.
I can't help but wonder if part of this is also due to the postal rate increases for non-standard sizes, mixed in with the economics of higher gas prices and thus higher paper prices. Those three factors have had a pretty big impact on the overhead for a lot of businesses. Thus, you're more likely to see higher value content stay the printed realm, while fleeting information will continue to show up online.
> Print can't die. It's still a core part of the way we communicate.
It's just one facet. Synergy between various mediums and channels is survival. Reliance on a single one seems like suicide.
This really isn't anything more than aping what Greg said, but just because Stephen Heller says something, doesn't mean our whole world automatically changed overnight. Don't get me wrong, Heller's vastly more intelligent and dialed in than I am, no contest. But this dialogue is really no different than it was in 1999 - same fire under the same people's asses.
When they can reproduce the feel of different stocks through my monitor, thats when I'll start worry.
>It's just one facet. Synergy between various mediums and channels is survival. Reliance on a single one seems like suicide.
This is of course quite true.
Our very history started with print, from rudimentary cave paintings, to ink on reeds, to parchment then paper. We have left marks for a very long time, it seems out-of-step to suggest that's suicide.
Print will always be part of our world. It's too expressive, too much a part of our daily lives to vanish entirely. The medium may change, but print won't die out, certainly not in the 'overnight' sense as occasionally suggested.
I don't have to be 'aping Greg' to realise the significance of print, or it's place in our past, present and future. Print is more than just the substance it's on.
I doubt print will die. I'm betting on Newspapers dying within my lifetime and moving to the web.
> I'm betting on Newspapers dying within my lifetime and moving to the web.
I don't know that I buy this. Look at all the advertising in newspapers. Aside form classified ads I have yet to notice a sever decline in ads and inserts in my local and national papers. I met the print manager for the local paper in St. Petersburg, Florida and he scoffed at the idea that print was in decline. Instead he was complaining that they were printing more than ever before in the twenty years that he had been at the paper.
And lets not forget that Rupert Murdoch just paid $5B for a daily newspaper.
Sure mom and pop shops are going to die, that's inevitable our global economy but it's certainly not exclusive to the print industry nor do I think that's a sign that we should place print on the deadpool.
Murdoch paid for the WSJ brand -- which happens (at the moment) to run a (shrinking in size and circulation) newspaper.
@Greg
I agree print isn't in decline, I think that newspapers are. In my lifetime, once all the older folks have died (morbid, huh?) All us younger folks who use the internet will inherit the earth ... and syndicate it.
As long as people like tactile objects (which I am sure will never go out of style) print will still have a place. But newspapers are questionable. I think they will either die or transition to the web. And by "newspapers," I mean the big generic newspapers, the ones that cover all news. Those will go away.
I'm sure there will still be those weekly artsy free newspapers, and other niche newspapers, but the big ones have such a big scope, all their news is available online before they even print it.
Anyways, it probably won't happen until I'm 70 or whatnot. Still far off, if it even happens. I could be wrong.
A little while back I asked a well known web designer about the Sept issue of Vogue. His response was simple and to the point.
>It's the new SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF VOGUE.
>It's 619 pages.
>You can buy it at any magazine store.
>You can't experience it online.
The last line tells all.
@ Ray: And only 13% of THIS September's issue is editorial content. That "experience" is almost entirely ads... if that's your thing.
My point another way:
Printing as an industry (both Mom & Pop and large, industrial printers) is in a deep decline, especially in the USA. Most large-scale print is sent overseas; a trend that will continue. The economics of printing/snail-mailing are increasingly hard to justify in a digital world. Largely because ...
Advertisers go where the people are. As magazine/newspaper circulation declines, advertisers leave. It's a vicious circle, and while there will always be exceptions (like Vogue and Brides) the vast majority of print periodicals are a lot thinner than they were 5 years ago. Classified ads (the cash-cow of newspapers) are going onilne exclusively. As rich(er) media becomes ubiquitous via the desktop, hiptop, phone the need to experience the print periodical will go away for most people — just like the need to experience the packaging has gone away for most people (but not a small, vocal percentage of fans) in the music world.
Most print is not fancy, glossy, designer items. It's junk. It's corporate memos, reports, pizza coupons, office materials. Just about all of this is going to on-demand digital in-house printing, and this is what is going to kill the printing industry, who survive printing crappy brochures not Dwell.
Packaging might be the one area of survival, as paper is at least greener than [the worst material on the planet] PVC. Physical goods aren't going to go away soon, and they're still going to need to come in something.
Books, doing okay, but like newspapers, the demographic is aging fast. Most people under 30 I know read nothing that isn't on a flat panel in front of them. No newspapers, no magazines, no books. Not all, but most.
While print will be around (like men's dress hats are still around), the ability to make your living as a print designer (or a haberdasher) is going to be drastically curtailed. Take it from someone who's been doing print for +20 years. I've seen it first hand, and it's not hard to see where the trend is going. I saw it 12 years ago, when I started playing with this stuff called HTML.
@Tom We were talking about effective use of color. Yes it's "our thing".
> That "experience" is almost entirely ads... if that's your thing.
My wife bought that 10lb. beast just to look through the ads. And I have been informed that she is very much not alone in her reason for puchasing that issue.
I agree. Print is not as wide spread, but it is not dying, plus it's tangible...you can actually touch and interact with it. That being said, I don't normally use paper...except to print out Google directions for my wife.
You people are print fans, and you're not alone (I'm one of you), but we won't keep print from dying. Lots of people love newspapers, music packaging, and a haberdashery, but most people don't care enough when offered a cheaper, faster, more convenient product. The issue is how do we make non-print better (and more print like), because print is going, going, almost gone.
I'd be willing to be that the "Print" industry will go through a significant shake-up, but not quite death. The feels more like the shake up of radio with the invention of television. Yes, radio changed in painful ways; yes, it shrunk in importance; but 50+ years later, it's still alive.
"You people"
Interesting choice of words.
> My wife bought that 10lb. beast just to look through the ads.
Yep, there is a whole world out there that enjoys ads and newspapers and the ritual of browsing and reading both. There is an experience in print that has yet to be reproduced electronically, one that many people relish. We are talking about print and electronic-media in a technical, sterile context - the truth is that they are both about experiences that, in many ways, compliment and extend one another. Success is found in the marriage both, not the death of either.
I'd say that Print, as an industry, is a ZOMBIE. It will never die.
I surely hope it doesn't.
Even if it does, then will all the letter press machines go cheaply?! (how big a garage will i need then?!?!)
What about those damn mailbox mailers that keep the USPS in business though? Something needs to be done about that waste.
Print won't ever die. We need something to wipe our tooshes with at the end of a session of unloading in the bathroom.