Good Day. People keep saying print is dying, and I do not think that is quite the truth of it. Print budgets are not collapsing so much as the web is arriving as a new cost beside them. Companies are doing both for now. The hard choice, the one where someone looks at the numbers and cuts print because the web is winning, that comes later. We are not there yet.
What I miss already, as the attention shifts, is the permanence of a printed piece. Once a thing is printed it is, in a way, immortal. There is something timeless about holding a physical copy that no power outage and no broken screen can take from you. If the lights go out you can build a fire and read it by that. There is an analog beauty in that which the web has not yet learned to offer.
The print principle I carry into everything digital is proportion, the golden ratio, the quiet mathematics of how a thing sits in its space. That does not change when the medium does. Good proportion is good proportion on paper or on glass.
I cannot say I have had a single farewell piece, a last great print job that felt like goodbye. But laying out a magazine for a freelance client this year, I did feel something archaic in it, a sense that the readership had quietly moved on while we kept setting type. Perhaps that was a small goodbye after all.
The people most certain about print used to say that nobody would ever read their news on a screen. I notice that more and more of us now get our news exactly that way. I suspect, in time, the printed paper will become the rarer thing, not the default.
So I am not mourning print. I am keeping it close, and carrying its lessons forward, because the medium that taught me permanence and proportion still has a great deal to teach the medium that is about to inherit the world.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · November 2006