Is Print Dead? And Has Social Media Made Brands Lazy?

Is Print Dead?

Over the past 20 years or so I’ve watched the world shift from paper to screen. It’s a simple fact that online communication is far easier and more convenient than printed media. But is this a good thing? My concern is that it may have made us lazy in the way we communicate.

I grew up playing with paper, Letraset and Spray Mount in my dad’s design studio in Covent Garden. It was a totally different scene back then. The Apple Macintosh was a new and not a widely used tool, for the tech-savvy new kids on the block. For the rest of the industry, it was all about PMT machines, bromides, typesetters, Letraset, and Spray Mount (I still love the smell of that stuff).

To create a piece of graphic communication was to handcraft a truly well-thought-out and graphicly well-presented piece of artwork. As a result of this painstaking design process, people would only say something if it was truly worth saying. Even putting something in writing to someone was harder back then. Can you imagine if we sent as many letters in the 80s as we send emails and texts now? The post office would have collapsed, and the posties would have to have been letter-delivering ninjas!

Growing up in this environment has obviously affected my way of thinking when it comes to design, and how we should approach a project. I’ve always thought that a project should start with a good idea and the aesthetic will become evident once the idea has developed. Wit has always been a big part of my idea creation. I don’t mean LOLs; I mean an idea that creates “A Smile in the Mind”. Printing processes can play a massive part in this. When I worked at Popcorn in the early 2000s we did an identity for a print production company called “Think”. At no point did we ever print the ink portion of the company name. We used debossing or reversed it out of block colours, but we never printed it. 

Another good example is an identity I did for a production company called Portal Entertainment. We drilled a hole in the cards where the ‘O’ on Portal should be. Simple but effective.

What I am trying to articulate is that these processes that can add so much to an idea, are becoming lost in our modern-day communications and I think it is a shame. The smell of ink on paper, the feel of a deboss on a thick cotton board, the shiny smooth elegance of a foil or spot UV, are all things that enrich a piece of communication. Think about how much more excited you get when you open a beautifully printed invitation, rather than an E-invite.

Has social media made brands lazy?

Now I’m not a technophobe and I’m not stuck in the 80’s. I am one of the many Adobe using, “Apple is a lifestyle” designer guys. I also find myself staring at Insta, FB, LinkedIn etc for hours on end. Thank God we don’t have to write endless letters and go to the post office 100 times a day!! Life would be a nightmare. No, I’m all for tech and how much simpler it has made communication.

What I am concerned about is that I think it has made it so easy to create content and broadcast it to 1000s of people with the click of a button, that we have become too reliant on the systems that help us do these things.

It’s not our fault, the social media giants have created apps that do it all for us and we are inherently lazy. Why get a designer to do it when the app will do it for us? Unfortunately, this has created a visual language of its own and it is incredibly dull, overused and becoming less impactful every day.

Think about it. Next time you are scrolling through your Instagram feed. Pay attention to what you are actually looking at. You will soon realise that all the content while talking about vastly different topics, is using a largely repetitive visual language. It all looks the same! It’s so rare that you find a post that someone has properly thought and worked out the best way to present what they are trying to say in a different and engaging way. When did you see something that was truly witty, not funny but clever in its communication?

I would love to see more brands as well as individuals creating pieces of well-thought-out and beautifully crafted communications. And while we don’t need to print everything, it would be nice to receive an invitation through the post for a change. Something to properly engage with and pull me away from the endless screens. Make me Smile in my mind and I will definitely pay more attention.

Those are my thoughts on the subject, I’d love to hear yours.