Every year publishers in the USA print 4 billion magazines. Worryingly, nearly 65% of those magazines end up in a landfill or recycling plant. Design and print experts tell us all the time that print is a dying industry and digital publishing is the future. When you hear a stat like that, it’s hard to disagree.
But is that really the case? OK, America is pulping over 2 billion magazines a year, but take a browse through the design shops of Clerkenwell or Shoreditch and you are literally inundated with hundreds of self-published, design-led magazines from not only art students, but well respected publishers too.
My favourite waste of lunchtime involves a fantastic shop on Clerkenwell road called “Magma”. They stock exactly the type of design magazines and books you could lose yourself in for hours. You find yourself browsing a Japanese book on urban stickers one minute, the next a magazine focused on 1950s typography. So much love clearly goes into the publication of things like this, interesting ink uses, strange paper types and more often than not a non-conforming size.
Both of these could have probably been committed to web in a fraction of the time it takes to design, proof and produce them, and no doubt they began life online as a small blog before being committed to print and distributed.
Of course, publishing online adds the vital multimedia factor, video, animation, sound etc. This is something you don’t get in the printed form (just yet!) and many of the design books you pick up often contain links and pointers to content rich websites that complement the publication you’re reading.
A great example of this is Web Design Index, which marries up online and offline publishing beautifully. Not only do you get a well produced book with hundreds of pages of design and illustration, but also an interactive CD-Rom of the complete book which contain links to the live sites showcased.
For me, this is the perfect marriage of both mediums, online and offline. Not only do you get something substantial to flick through and browse on the train home, but also a real interactive user experience should you wish to spend some time digging deeper into the content.
Obviously this isn’t a new idea, book publishers have been complementing there publications with CD-ROMs for years, but more often than not, the accompanying CD has been nothing more than a disc full of pictures or text. Making the effort to build an interactive CD-ROM to interact with the book is time consuming, costly, and potentially expensive. However, when it is done correctly, it works amazingly well and you get a truly brilliant user experience.
Design is beautiful wherever it is published. But for me it’s never more beautiful than when someone has gone to effort of producing something you can hold in your hand and admire. Billions of web pages come and go, but there is something amazing about a good old fashioned magazine.
With the booming “print-on-demand” industry, and the costs of printing falling all the time, I’m confident we are only going to see more of the same from artists, designers and self publishers alike!
“A very interesting read, the direction of the print industry never ceases to amaze and the question of which direction it will take is a subject in itself. The waste in print the US, is really shocking”