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Photo via The Oatmeal
Printing sucks, it’s a truth that no decent graphic designer will ever admit. I love thumbing through paper sample books like everyone else. I’ll nerd out over embosses and gold foils, I spend _hours _looking at new business cards and old letterheads from the 30’s. I love that shit. But the sheer logistics these days of getting something from your computer to a piece of tree that vaguely resembles your grand idea, at a good price, is often staggering. File sending software, huge attachments that freeze computers, the whole mac/pc thing, that cmyk/rgb thing, home printers, the price of ink, these are all little problems, but they do add up, and so does the frustration.
There’s also the environmental issue. I’m hardly a sustainable person, there’s so many things I could do to tidy up my act, (however, I’m never sticking a ‘one less car’ sticker on my bike). But even I can see that paper these days doesn’t make much sense.
I posted a quote by William Donough about a month ago and over 100 bloggers have re-posted it or liked it. That’s nothing in terms of a standard seinfeld screen freeze on tumblr, but it’s the most I’ve ever got, and I think people really noticed the craziness of knocking down trees so we can print out something that originated from the computer.
I think that portfolios (btw the best folio i’ve seen in ages) look the way they do more out of a nostalgic metaphor, something that is a visual link to the golden age of graphic design, before the PC. Maybe when I graduate my book won’t be a ‘book’, and maybe that won’t be such a bad thing.
