The world of print isn’t quite what it used to be for designers. In fact, web design is now the No. 1 business opportunity among corporate design departments, beating out print design for the first time ever! Among designers surveyed, 40% chose web design as their top business opportunity while 36% chose print design, according to TrendWatch Design & Production Survey No. 8 – Winter 2000. As firms in the industry have been known to say, print is not dead, however these numbers provide another sign of the Web’s encroachment on designing for print, and eventually on output to print.
Print design still tops the list of business opportunity for ad agencies, graphic designers, and commercial photographers. Nearly 7 out of 10 agencies chose print design as their No. 1 business opportunity, while web design scored high for 60% of firms in these areas. Among designers, 65% chose print design and 59% chose web design as topping their list of new business opportunities.
There may be hidden quicksand in these shifting opportunities. It puts even more pressure on the industry to find the right people and internal systems to manage and integrate analog and digital processes and systems. This shift in importance for web design is changing the type of employees, training and software that creative shops need.
This shift also changes the market focus and job mix of creative shops as workflow and production systems move away from established print focused processes. And finally, for corporate design department managers, the trend means more dreaded involvement with corporate Information Services (IS) types who still want to standardize everything.
Copyright 2000 PrintPlace.com, Inc. All rights reserved.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on April 1, 2000
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We’ve all known that while print is not going anywhere, that the print industry was going to change from what it was five years ago. Change is good and it’s inevitable. Designers should embrace the new challenges ahead of us. These are good times!!!!