What an interesting journey Litho Colour Systems has been on over the past twenty-odd years.

Reading about the rebrand of the various Fresh Media Group businesses (for it is they) under the FMG banner gave me pause to think about how few of those "old school" repro houses and typesetters have either a) survived, or b) successfully transformed themselves into a new type of operation.

Life got very difficult, very rapidly in repro once desktop publishing kicked in, and the shockwaves were such that some businesses simply crumbled. The tremors continue to this day with more and more publishers moving to some sort of in-house or halfway house pre-press model.

With change comes opportunity, of course, and some entirely new pre-press - or should I say pre-media - companies have emerged as a result without being burdened by the baggage of the past.

But such a transformation is a difficult trick to pull off for an established business, so I must applaud the team at FMG, which now describes itself as a "creative and production agency working across print, digital and video".

I like the fact that creatives from all these different disciplines will sit alongside each other as a result of the group's revamp, as the cross-fertilisation of expertise will surely be hugely beneficial to both FMG and its clients.

Indicative of all this is the fact that Dominic Duffy, who co-founded FMG's interactive publication platform Ceros, will be speaking about digital catalogues at the ECMOD show in London today. Duffy can of course talk about this clever interactive stuff from a position of being perfectly informed about the strengths of the hard copy version, which has to be a good thing.

Once the current over-excitement about online/digital advertising settles down I think there will be a growing realisation that the best and most successful campaigns use a combination of media, playing to the strengths of each. Man cannot sell by banner or email alone. A company like FMG would appear to be perfectly positioned to make the most of these multi-media opportunities.