Printers and designers don’t always take the chance to talk to each other about how to make print really powerful. An odd state of affairs considering how vital a close working relationship typically is.
Hearteningly, we discover, as animated discussions about technical quandaries, new innovative techniques and print’s place in the media mix, go on well beyond the allotted time, that there is plenty of appetite from our budding designers to do just this.
The printers
Paul Hewitt, owner of Brighton-based “letterpress to digital” printer Generation Press. Hewitt’s company produces a wide range of formats, from fine art prints to address labels, from look books to marketing materials for brands such as the V&A, Design Museum and Links of London.
Andy Wilson, managing director at Kent-based wide-format printer PressOn. The company produces the full range of internal and external retail graphics, including large-scale mall media, hoardings, vehicle wraps and bespoke wallpapers.
Paul Manning, managing director at commercial printer and cross-media house Rapidity. Based in Angel, east London, Rapidity’s core work is corporate reports and brochures, and university course materials, with the emphasis on creative digital printing. Jobs of note include athletes’ certificates for the London 2012 Olympics.
THE DEBATES
What is the design-for-print landscape like today?
Paul Hewitt Although we work with brands, we work with designers too and they’re the guardians of that brand. We did work for Paul Smith years ago and we’re not doing that anymore, but the designer we worked with is now working for Links of London, so you follow people around.
Andy Wilson There are so many one-man bands working from home. Don’t be fazed by the big brands; there’s a massive cottage industry of independent designers going on behind the scenes, and some of those are for top blue-chip brands.
Paul Manning The print buyer’s gone, my granddad was a print buyer and someone would come to him with a job and say ‘go and get that’. That one-way route into print has gone now, thank God. This collaborative thing works much better.
AW Our company doesn’t work very well with being told what to do. If you want to design it and say ‘that’s what I want’, it’s not going to be as good. Our company doesn’t respond well to not having a contribution, if I’m honest. It has to be a collaboration.
I think now, printers are more of an extension of the design stage. 20 years ago, you had a designer locked away in an office coming out with the creative, which, after being approved by 20 other people in the creative department, went to the print buyer who purchased it. Nowadays, that print buyer’s role, and the extra people in the creative department, are pretty much diminished. Today, designers get an opportunity to work more closely with the manufacturing process, to play with it.
PH We tend to work collaboratively. The designer needs to work with the programmer, the printer. You, as designers, need to build your team around you because you can’t do it all. Teamwork is how the independent designer is going to succeed because if you try to do it all, you dilute your qualities. So connect with each other, find the programmer, find the person who’s great with photographs.
Rose Gridneff (tutor): It’s really interesting to hear you say that, because there are a lot of tutors here very much of the position that everybody needs to know a bit about everything. But what you’re saying is the industry isn’t reflecting that.
AW The industry is evolving beyond recognition every three years, so lecturers may not realise that since the recession, things have been completely turned upside down. I can see your point of view, but from our point of view: specialists please. There are very few similarities between a website and beautiful gatefold presentation pack. They’re produced completely differently.
Eleanor French (student) I’m working for a brand at the moment and they want me to work across the website, print, everything, and it’s overwhelming.
Kate Jeffries (student) I think it’s about trying to save money by getting the designer to do everything at once. They want you to do websites, retouch photos, etc, whereas that’s really the photographer’s job rather than the graphic designer’s job. I’ve come across that a couple of times.
AW You’re entering a competitive market. If you’re working for Louis Vuitton, you’ve got to come up with a better campaign than Hugo Boss. For the Christmas windows, for example, a lot of them sit on the fence and see what everyone else is up to. Whereas in the old days, when the print buyers were involved, you guys would design something and hope that someone, somewhere along the line would ensure a good interpretation of that. We now work as the extension of your department. So you ship us in and say ‘what can you do to help us communicate this message?’
Jenny Roper (PrintWeek): So are you saying designers will have the edge if they utilise their printers properly?
AW Exactly. There are plenty of us out there that can help you achieve what you want to design.
PH The boundaries are your imagination. Unless people like yourselves are pushing the boundaries these technologies don’t come on. So I push it back at you to challenge us to create something. More often than not we’ll find a way to do it.
How much do designers need to know about print technologies?
Josh Epstein-Richards (student) Now I feel confident going to the printers down the road to ask for something I want to do, but the first few months it’s tricky. The printers are asking all these questions I don’t know the answers to. I feel like I should probably know the answers because I’m coming to you. If I don’t know even just the use of language, then I feel out of my depth.
PM As an industry we’re awful though. We’ll just talk at people about matt, silk, gloss, bleed...
AW If you know what bleed is congratulations, because it took me 10 years to work it out!
PM We as an industry make it as hard as possible to come and talk to us. The good companies are the ones who make it easy and can show you various options. We’re changing that now. We’ve realised the hard way.
Chloe Ashborn (student) It maybe should be more of a two-way dialogue, but you always feel so rushed.
PM There’s been a decline in high-street printing so there are fewer places for you to go and ask someone about something. And our industry’s so diverse; the three companies here are totally different, but you’re not going to know that because we just brand ourselves as printers. So which one do you go to? I don’t envy you.
AW That’s a good point. If you go in there and the guy doesn’t seem particularly interested it may be that you’ve got the wrong printer. The job that you’re trying to give to him, he maybe doesn’t want to admit that he can’t do it.
Will Lyall (student) To some extent not knowing what you want to do is a problem, but you want to experiment with something and that’s part of the excitement. Being able to experiment more with materials is the exciting fun part.
AW Exactly, and it’s not essential for you to know everything, that’s down to us. The industry is moving so fast it’s hard enough for us to keep up.
JR What can you now do that you couldn’t do in the past that these guys might not know about?
AW How long have you got?! Things we’re doing now we couldn’t do two years ago. We did all the Olympics wraps for the cabs, that’s 2,000 vehicles in six months, which had never been done before, not ever. I’ve had machines that haven’t even been paid for yet and yet they’ll have gone out of date. Literally within two years you can increase the speed by four fold. Latex ink just wasn’t commercially viable four years ago but now it’s our mainstay. You couldn’t print bespoke wallpaper a few years ago, so it’s a whole different world of opportunity.
PM The biggest thing overlooked in our industry is substrate, especially in the small formats. We can print on dark substrates now – it sounds obvious, but you never used to be able to.
Is print still powerful?
WL How important do you think it is for students to push print in their work?
PH The point is print is always going to be needed where it’s needed. It’s like we’ve thrown everything up in the air and we’re seeing where it’s going to land. I don’t think one’s going to land on top of the other. Each has it’s place, we’re just still figuring out where exactly its place is.
PM Our biggest client is a local university and we keep printing black and white corner stitched course materials. Every time I walk through the factory I think ‘how long’s it going to be before that’s not there?’ But when you talk to the university, it’s no time soon.
AW In wide-format, the digital image is evolving, it’s changing but as there are more and more opportunities to put rear projection screens in shop windows, LED screens, plasma screens, projections on floors, augmented reality, nine times out of 10 it’s got a printed background around it. And we’re working with an advertising agency putting a giant LED screen in Westfield costing £20,000 a week and probably that again to generate the digital content. But they’ll let people know about it with a £50 banner inside.
PM Packaging is a massive market that’s coming on in leaps and bounds because of the ability to produce short-run and regionalised packaging. Environmentally we’ve been hit hard over the years, we get seen as bad for the environment – that’s actually a load of rubbish. There’s a lot of information about how digital isn’t so environmentally friendly. I’ve had several iPads, one’s in the bin now and that’s never going to decompose. There’s a lifecycle to print.
CA So you’re saying that print’s place now is quality over mass produced media?
AW Absolutely. Because technology exists to produce something for a certain region. For example, we do sampling for a big supermarket, so they’ll put something in one store and see how that goes. Years ago that would have cost a fortune to produce but now you can do it and have it in the store the next day.
PH My favourite story is about a graphic designer who said to his brother-in-law, who owned a furniture business, ‘at Christmas you should do a little brochure because you’re struggling’. It took six months to convince him, but six months later he’s supplying Harrods and Bloomingdales – just from one small beautifully considered piece of print, he’s now selling around the world.
CA I saw something cool this morning. It was print on a bench in New York. They’d used glow in the dark ink so that in the daytime it said ‘this is a bench’ and at night ‘this is a home’. It was a campaign for raising awareness about homelessness. It was really clever because you couldn’t have done that in any other format.
And magazines. Although I think it’s important that now modern designers have to take into consideration iPad editions, for example, I’d hate it if magazines were to turn completely digital, that would be probably one of the worst things that could happen.
JE A magazine needs to be something you can hold and physically flick through, if you’re looking at it on your iPad it’s just not the same.
Amy Fullalove (student) And with websites you’ve got a sense of it being transient. You look at something on a website then sort of forget about it. Whereas I’ve got magazines on my shelf, particular issues that I’ll always go back to and will always have. You’ve got the longevity.
JE It’s better to archive things in print. You find a picture on a website and it’s trying to find that again a year later – it can be impossible. But if it’s a book you know what book it is.
EF It might sound silly but print makes things more human to me. It’s tactile. Losing yourself online is horrible, you do go a bit crazy, it’s overwhelming.
AW I subscribe to Motor Sport magazine and when that arrives in my office, it’s a whole sense of occasion. It’s in this really nice envelope. My whole day stops, no matter what I’m doing. I’ve got all of these digital technologies, but my whole day stops. I go and make a cup of tea and that’s the highlight of my month.
PM Many people now send massive casebound catalogues. The reason is, well, try and throw that away for a start. But then it goes on the shelf to refer to. Coca-Cola did the ‘share a Coke’ thing all round the world because they’re realising a connection through print is worth a lot more.
JE I’ve got a bottle on my shelf with my name on it.
PM And you’ll keep it and it’ll sit there.
JE But if it didn’t have my name on it then I wouldn’t have it on my shelf!
JR Do you guys feel confident that as designers you’re going to be able to go out there and persuade people of what you know about print’s power?
JE I think it’s already been proved. The whole ‘print is going to die’ thing is obviously not the case. That’s obviously not going to happen. I feel we can leave confident, able to say ‘this is how much more effective a print design might be’.
