It's hip to make the trip to dip into the Pip - Print 21 magazine article

The quadrennial print monster is back in 2008. Yes, drupa is just four short months away and five-drupa veteran Andy McCourt ponders on whether it is still worth the trip, sore legs and hangovers in this era of instant information. With our own great regional trade shows getting stronger, does drupa still deliver on its promise? There's one overriding reason to be there, he argues. Creative inspiration.

Creativity is the principal reason why we in the printing industry exist. It is the driver, the vehicle and the destination of visual communication. Without creativity at every level of print communications, we would be lost. Some of us are lost because we have lost our creative zeal. Just churn out another 15,000 sheets an hour of greasy pigments smeared on mashed up trees, cut them up, fold them and bind them and who cares what messages they carried or how they could have been creatively improved?

With our industry, creativity is not limited to the 'creatives' - the ones typically stereotyped as designers, copywriters, art directors and agencies who come up with the 'whacky' ideas that printers often criticise as unprintable because they lack the imagination and talent to try and make it work. Think inside the square and you will inhabit a square world. Think outside of it and the cosmos is yours.

At the equipment level, creativity in design and engineering brings us new products and efficiencies. How often have I marveled at the sheer creative engineering brilliance that results in a modern high-speed, multi-colour press operating to such fine tolerances and accuracy. Creative thought bought us DTP, CTP, digital printing, the PC, the Mac, the mouse, PostScript, the laser printer - and the origins of printing itself.

But isn't drupa just a huge marketplace where vendors of heavy metal, software and consumables try to pry as many orders as possible from 400,000 visitors in two weeks? Maybe for some but, after five pilgrimages to Düsseldorf, I am convinced that the best drupa has to offer is the free stuff. It's what you learn while you are there that counts and much of this learning is in the area of creation.

Where's the wow factor?
It's not just new software applications and plug-ins; drupa shows, as no other trade show does, just what can be achieved through the medium of print. You see techniques and end products that inspire the 'wow' factor but are often dismissed as 'too fancy for my market.' Good people, if you think that everyone just wants an A4 page with CMYK on it, you are consigning yourself to a commodity market of ever-decreasing profits.

Creativity also applies to methodologies. "We've always done it this way" is the mantra of the obsolete, irrelevant and unimaginative. If CIP4, JDF and integration with MIS makes sense for your business then why fight it, or allow those who work for you to fight it? If web-to-print sounds geeky and unattainable by 'true tradesmen' why not go back to hot-metal type?

Do you think for one minute that if Gutenberg suddenly time-traveled to a 21st century press hall that he would lament the fact that it was not populated by dozens of wooden screw-presses instead of long perfectors whirring away? Would Senefelder deride CTP? These are just two of the marvelously creative individuals who changed our industry; they would welcome the advances and probably come up with new, creative ways to use the print medium.

The 2008 drupa is selling itself as being the biggest ever, with over 1,800 exhibitors and covering over 170,000 square metres in 19 halls ('roughly equivalent to 40 soccer fields' no less!) Who really cares? If I can get the ideas and learning - even goals - on one soccer field, I'm happy.

Deeply dippy in the drupa city
And yet the creative jewels are within drupa - Messe Düsseldorf is just a little more obsessed with its numbers and square metres. Very square. There's Print City in Hall 6 - the third time it has presented itself at a drupa. Print City is all about making everything work together from creation to print, in a collaborative environment where over 30 companies stage working demonstrations that reflect 'real world' print shops rather than canned demonstrations that sometimes deserve Oscars more than orders. Print City will also host forums and competence centres - all in a learning and upskilling environment.

There's also the drupa innovation parc (why they can't call it a park instead of misusing Xerox's great Palo Alto Research Centre acronym, I don't know). Abbreviated to the 'Dip', perhaps the irony is lost on the organisers but nevertheless it promises great things with explorations of future publishing techniques and a long overdue initiative - educating print buyers on how to successfully buy print in what drupa calls the 'Print buyer Integration Parc.' I suppose that will end up being called the 'Pip' so print buying folks can go for a 'dip in the pip'. And by ship if they head up the Rhine.

My advice, for what it is worth, is go to drupa with an empty head ready to take in new creative thinking, rather than a full wallet to spend on new kit.

But heck, if it makes you feel good to lash out $4 million on a new press in a far off land, why not?