Hey design community! My name's Nicole and I'm a graphic designer based out of Edmonton, Alberta working for these dudes in Lacombe. I'll be blogging every so often on matters close to my heart: print design. Above all, I'd love to facilitate a conversation on design... so whether you agree or disagree with me, please just speak up!

It seems every other week, a web designer tells me the jig is up, my days as a print designer are numbered. Didn't you hear? About this thing called the internets? It's going to make print design obsolete. Some days, amid facebook and twitter and the increasing amount of time I spend online, I worry they're right.

But most days I smile smugly and let them talk, secure in knowing that my job is safe because one thing the digital world can't replicate is tangibility. They can't manufacture the emotional resonance that comes with turning pages or holding a well-designed business card in your hand.

More than that, print design is evolving. They said that television would kill radio. It didn't, it just serves a different purpose now. As print designers we need to focus on doing the things we do, and doing them better. With purpose. Let's not get hung up on what the internet is taking away from our livelihood and instead look at the needs it's creating, what it can't do. Some schools of thought in design say simplicity is the key: you must remove, remove, remove. If you don't need it, it shouldn't be there.

Let's remove the antiquated practice of mass mail-outs and create better promotional materials that our audience will want to hang onto instead of put out with the recycling. Let's remove the idea that the web and print have to compete, let them work in tandem. By removing the excess that web can obviously do better than print, we can all focus, redirect our clients' energy (and budget) and instead showcase print design's strengths.

Is design technology doing what we need it to do?  New products are everywhere, but is technology helping with quality products or obfuscating design's purpose with quantity of products?  Are those responsible for rendering our designs doing so in a timely way?  Finally, is infrastructure for cloud computing ready for what designers will need it to do?

When I started designing, technology was looking for ways to catch up to design.  Programs were popping up for illustration, photo manipulation, colour, pantone integration, tablets, etc.  After a while, the software and hardware caught up, and (not for the first time) changed everything about the way we produced design work.  Some more time goes by, the technology passed us, and the world of design moved far beyond typography, grids, shapes and the colour wheel to a lot of really technical, software and server oriented advancements.  Fine, learn some code.  Wait a year or two, and then no longer was simply knowing HTML enough to make websites, you had to evolve again with technology.  As a designer, it was a question of not if I could learn a new programming language or program, but whether the particular language or technology was niche, or indeed the wave of the future.  We, as designers, evaluate all new things this way.  This, I imagine, is because we are not just designers, but also business people - people who evaluate a skill on the marketability of the skill in question.  At some point you have to make a choice - either you're going to continue learning every single program coming out, or you're going to start doing what you love - which is to say, designing things for people that need it with the skills that you have.  

For example, when Flash was new, I pondered learning it - and I did, a bit, but demand wasn't there, and I wasn't too interested in making animated websites that required a plugin to function.  At the time, many people weren't even allowed to install it, so it seemed like a poor idea.  Over time, flash has certainly grown in appeal to me, but it's still a niche so far as what clients actually need in terms of visual communications.  Certainly it is more useful to certain types of industry than others.  I digress.  I love flash, it just wasn't in demand in my area.

I don't really want to make examples out of any specific software that I consider to be less than useful because it isn't productive.  The people who make the software know it's not (because they see the numbers) and you know when you come across a piece of software or hardware that is not, in the foreseeable future, going to be of any use to you or anyone you know.  The reasons why this irrelevant technology gets made in the first place could fill a whole blog post, so lets just say that there are reasons.  The reasons themselves are not as important so much as the noise to signal when we're looking to advance our skill-sets, and ultimately make visual communication pieces for our clients.  

Lets talk about some technology that has jived with design, shall we?

The focus of this post is the metamorphosis of a few industries that have gone under the unforgiving microscope of the internet: how would their business model succeed when the physics of their media shifted?  For music, it's been rough - ask the major labels - many of them now seem to have made the changes that they need to make.  iTunes features most of its catalogue from the majors as DRM free downloads; independent labels were there as DRM free long before them.  The key has not been "How do we control this" - conversely, it's been "how do we make this as easy as possible for people to buy?  What is the fewest number of clicks possible between the user and checking out of our eCommerce system with product?"  

For a long time it has been easier to torrent a piece of material than to buy it.  That was not the problem of the torrent maker; it was an opportunity for the music industry to have something made that worked efficiently for consumers.  One of iTunes key success factors has been that, through their interface and process, they've made it easier for customers to legitimately buy music instead of having to go to the trouble of downloading it for free off of a relatively unpredictable service.

The success of these businesses has become a design issue.