For Position Only: The Brave New World Facing Print
When dot-coms began biting the dust last year, I’m sure some print-based companies felt smug. Print, the medium of the past millennium, withstood the onslaught of the upstart Internet and emerged relatively unscathed. But did it, really? Think about it: All of those dot-businesses needed printed collateral pieces, so they generated print-based marketing materials and advertised in print publications. As a result, the shakedown in new media has indeed rippled over to the print industry, which like much of the rest of the economy is also experiencing slower growth now than in the last decade.
Actually, the print industry has been squeezed for a while now. The bursting of the dot-com bubble is just tightening the rope around the industry’s neck: The print market was growing at 4 to 5 percent in the mid to late 1990s (compared to 5 to 6 percent for the economy overall), but that rate is down to about 3 percent now, according to the National Association for Printing Leadership and the Graphic Arts Information Network. The reasons are many and complex, including the increased reliance on electronic documents in the last decade; the proliferation of digital, toner-based printing devices in the corporate environment; and the fact that the print manufacturing process has had difficulty keeping up with the technological times. Why, just last month RR Donnelley & Sons reported that its first-quarter profits were down 68 percent year to year. But although the short-term economy might be looking rather gloomy for the print industry, I’d argue that now is the perfect time for printers to ramp up for the future, before the crunch is back on.
Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back…
Despite my gruesome metaphor about the noose, I don’t believe the print industry is going to mount the scaffolding any time soon; I believe it will be vital for years to come, in spite of the fact that so many of its own practitioners seem to do their utmost to drag it to a grinding halt. Printers are notorious for resisting change, but as any designer worth her salt knows, change drives the publishing business. Folks on the creative side have been knocking themselves out for the last decade to master each new tool of their trade that comes along, thus making sure their jobs are not just more productive but also more interesting. Printers on the other hand have been busy telling their creative partners to slow down. Just as you’re ready to switch from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign, your printer finally upgrades to QuarkXPress 4.0.
OK, so I exaggerate (you’re probably not ready for InDesign), but you get the point. Printers are conservative. I don’t begrudge their good intentions; they want to produce a sound, high-quality product for you without driving costs though the ceiling or missing your own (rushed) deadline. Indeed, technologies shouldn’t be adopted or updated lightly. Just think of the havoc that might be caused by poorly implemented color management: If that highly paid stick-figure model has a sallow gray flesh tone on page 3 of “Vogue” and you didn’t catch the mistake because of a misapplied proofer profile, guess what’s going to hit the fan?
Too Much of a Good Thing
Printers are looking out for your best interests, but there has to be a limit. If the recent wave of mergers and acquisitions hasn’t made it clear enough, let me say it explicitly: Innovation is the best and most important way for a printer to ensure a vital business model. A printer may want to fend off or invite acquisition, it depends; but the only way to have the choice is to be viable. And it’s not like there’s a lack of innovative technologies for printers to choose from. There are all kinds of digital short-run and production printing presses, one for every budget and niche (ink and toner; continuous- and sheet-fed; sweet spots of 500 to 50,000 pages); multiple direct-imaging presses (and more on the way); a wide variety of variable-data software packages and digital front-ends; dozens of CTP devices (drum and flatbed; polyester and metal plates; thermal and visible light and violet laser imaging).
While manufacturers for the publishing industry continue to evolve their presses, inks, and so on, none of these devices or supplies is an essentially new technology; some have been around for going on 10 years now. The standard excuse of not wanting to be on the bleeding edge — of not wanting to risk profitability or their good name with untested equipment or technologies — doesn’t wash: Vendors are more willing than ever to work with printers to smooth over rough spots with their technologies, and to show printers how to make money with the same.
From Mainz to New Media
Even as the economy changes, a simple fact remains: You have to spend money to make money. So if printers want to keep making money five, seven, ten years down the road, they need to start investing now in the technologies they will need in the future. Frankly, I would think they’d be glad the investment doesn’t have to be another multi-million-dollar eight-color Heidelberg press. For the same (dollar) output or less, they can get not only a short-run digital press that will meet their customers’ evolving needs but also the prepress equipment (servers and software) and the telecom infrastructure they need to make the transition a smooth one.
The way I see it, we’re moving on a continuum that began in the mid-15th century when Johannes Gutenberg printed that first Bible in Mainz. Back then and for the next few centuries, books were a luxury, rare and expensive. As the printing process became increasingly mechanized, however, printed pieces became commoditized. Printers hate to think of their craft as a commodity; they strive to keep standards high, and that’s a good thing. But printing reaches a mass audience now in a way that it didn’t four centuries ago.
And here’s where printers can take some cues from their dot-com cousins. As the Web continues to ingratiate its way into our everyday lives, a whole brave new world will open for printers, a world characterized by custom print projects such as short-run, demographically specific catalogs, personalized news and periodicals, and on-demand books. If printers want to maintain the high standards of their craft well into the future — and make money — then it’s incumbent on them to orchestrate that change in a way that gives them control over the process and the final product.
But they can’t do it without your help. You know that communication with your prepress and printing partners is key to a successful design project, but don’t just talk about the brochure that’s queued up for next week. Take the lead and start a dialog with your printer about who your clients are and how their needs are evolving. Not only will it help you understand how you’ll have to serve them in the future, but it will also help your printer figure out how she needs to serve you. That way, you can both win. You can both help your businesses thrive, which is a lot more than a lot of dot-coms can boast these days.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on May 10, 2001
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