Looking back to the future: Print 21 magazine article

What sort of printing industry will it be in 20 years time for those practitioners who are starting out today? Will the printers of today go the way of the typesetters and scanner operators of yesteryear? Derek Fretwell draws on his experience of the past two decades to make some bold predictions about what will become of ink on paper.

A reader asked me recently what I would do about a career in print if I were 35 again and about to return to New Zealand after some years abroad. I must confess that the thought of being 35 again is a great deal more attractive as a subject than anything I could write about the future of print. Oh yes, we were indeed kings in 1986, and it doesn’t seem that long ago really.

Desktop typesetting had, in five years, completely eliminated the entire typesetting industry, sending to the wall billion dollar businesses like Linotype and Compugraphic. A funny thing called PostScript was being talked about as some kind of threat to the very rich manufacturers of colour scanners. It just seemed impossible to contemplate the demise of massive businesses like Crosfield, Hell, Atex and others.

Some of the richest businesses in print were the peripheral suppliers of things like prepress services and plate-making. Outsourced post-print service companies also abounded. Most printers still aspired to own a large format four colour press and most printers, then as now, aspired to sell work cheaper than the guy down the road. A seemingly inbuilt curse of our industry.

Agfa did not make plates and was thinking of entering the proofing market. DuPont was a major supplier to the industry, HAN did not exist and AUS was ANZUS. Fax machines were replacing the telex as the main means of international communication. Most cities had a morning and an evening newspaper, and I was a superfit, bodybuilding squash player with hair down to my eyebrows. Oh yes, 1986, I remember it well.

My point is that the future can, to some extent, be predicted by the past. If not in the fact of change then perhaps in the amount. So if my reflections make the industry of 1986 seem quaint and backward to you, be assured that the industry of 2009 will be seem utterly prehistoric to the practitioners of 2032. The trends that led to the industry of today were already being seen in 1986 so we may assume that some of the happenings of today are predictors of 2032. So, as requested, I now speculate on the two major uses for printing (publishing and packaging) and where the trends of today may take them by 2032.

A new paper
Firstly, let’s think about paper. Stock, substrate, carrier – whatever you like to call it – and the idea of applying a substance to it to carry information, the print or production part of what we call publishing. I suggest there is very little doubt that, in 2032, it just will not be done that way. If there is a need for ‘printed’ communication I suggest the substrate will be erasable and reusable. A kind of ‘paper’ version of a large screen TV. This will emulate in all respects the functionality of paper and may even look exactly like a book, magazine or other publication of today, the difference being that the published information is loaded rather than coated. When finished with, information is simply erased and the next edition, mag, news ‘paper’ or whatever replacement information requirement is loaded in its place.

For a very primitive forerunner of the process, observe a user reading the news directly off the internet on a cell phone. The information is loaded, used and replaced in exactly that manner. Primitive, for sure, but then in 1986 a colour scanner was about 3,000 times more expensive than today and somewhat less capable. Who would have thought so at the time? Imagine a programmable substrate with the properties of paper and the functionality of a computer in place of the cell phone and you start to get the idea.

Publishing via printing in 2032 will, in my view, have become an art form. It will have the same relevance to information dissemination then as hand calligraphy has to book printing now. The great gravure and web offset publication presses will no longer be producing printed information. Libraries will be completely digital, completing a process that has already started, and any information printing required will be done personally on the new erasable and re-usable substrate yet to be invented. We will simply not be permitted to fell forests in order to fill rubbish dumps and the environmental practices of 2009 will be regarded with the same horror we now remember dumping chemicals down the nearest drain in 1986!

That great consumer of printed material, the advertising industry, will have shifted completely to meeting the very discerning demands of the new online audience. Demand advertising will change the rules for many, and businesses will live or die in cyberspace where the audience, not the advertiser, sets the rules.

Print is valuable
I believe that same audience will regard printed material very differently to us. In a world where everything is transient, anything providing even the illusion of permanence will assume a far greater value. Where we regard printed material as disposable, the consumer of 2032 will regard it as valuable, because it will be! The trend I describe is observable at any shopping mall where people queue up by the hundreds and pay to have digital photographs printed. Why is this? Digital photographs are viewable on any computer, most cell phones and certainly on the camera itself. But those images are transitory. To really remember the giant trout I caught last summer, the growing experiences of the kids, the wedding or the divorce, to make it real, I need to print it.

We are not far away from the time when if you want a brochure on the latest and greatest you will be expected to pay for it. The unvalued, disposable information will not, as now, be the printed material but the electronic. View what you want on the website but if you want the costly printed brochure you will need to convince me it’s worth letting you have one! And right there, in that permanence, is the future of the printing industry, in my humble view, of course.

There is little doubt too that the industrialisation of the planet will continue and as more consumers gain wealth the demand for packaging will continue to increase. The requirement will be protection complemented by the additional functions of promotion. It is hard to conceive of a better way of protecting something than by surrounding it with the appropriate packaging and it is hard to conceive of a better way of making a substrate ‘protective’ than by coating it with the right substance, let’s call it ink for the sake of discussion.

Inkjet will be it
So there is a permanent and enduring future for the printing industry. It may and will change in terms of relevance, demand and profitability. Almost certainly it will not include anything to do with publishing but, even in 2032, someone will be laying down ink on paper, making a buck or two out of it and someone will be supplying the ink, the stock and the equipment.

But what of the equipment? Practically all signage is nowadays produced by some kind of inkjet technology and we are seeing the first developments applied not just to quality but to production as well. Is there a trend we can see?. Well, I can purchase a printer for personal use capable of exceeding in image quality the best offset printing. For the cost of a large offset press I can purchase several thousand of them. I believe the dominant technology, the method that places images on the most numbers of pages in 2032 will be inkjet, and I suggest it already is. This is the home and business printing market that has completely passed the printing industry by and it is massive. Millions of printers printing millions of colour pages every day. And millions of users who aren’t quite happy with the result, particularly if they need more than 50 sheets or so.

Simply put, when the requirement exceeds the capability of the inkjet technology, then the resort to the printing industry, usually sheetfed offset, occurs. Now they will get much, much better the inkjet devices and one day they will replace in capability offset and other processes – but not by 2032.

So, for my young enquirer thinking of returning to New Zealand, be assured; Godzone will still be here and will still have an industry called the printing industry using all of the various technologies we have seen and described. There will be a huge growth in inplant printerys as the digital presses remove the need for trade skills and the digital printing press is seen as just a giant printer. They will need and employ staff. But those staff will be operators rather than printers. They will be skilled in print production across a broad band of technologies of which offset printing may be one.

You will need to know more about how different substrates perform through different print processes than ink-water balance or press registration. Instead of matching the proof you will be matching the screen, matching it to several processes and choosing the process that best fits the requirement. You will have highly-developed keyboard and computer skills and knowledge, you will be a master craftsman of your era. And you will have an absolute ball. I did.