Gardener of Print

The pros and cons of keeping print media alive

Illustration & text Lotta Nykänen

Humankind has possessed the urge to write things down since the dawn of time. From scribbles in a cave to creating calendars, history books, novels and eventually the printed word, we are so keen to get our thoughts out to the world that we’re willing to put centuries into developing the most efficient way of doing so. Jumping ahead to the technological revolutions of the modern era, it has however come to question: how important is the printed word when you have so many other mediums to put your message through?

Food for memories

If you were a bookworm as a child like I was, you probably have at least one or two books you’ve read more than once. Okay, maybe a dozen. The reason behind reading a book over and over again is not because you can't remember what happened in it. It’s more about the emotional experience and the great memories you had with the book, that make you want to revisit it from time to time. The same effect rarely comes from digital media: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve re-watched a tv-series and by the end of season god-knows-how-many I’ve completely forgotten the major plot points of the beginning of the show, no matter how impressed I was with the story.

Print Power Magazine points out a few neurological and psychological studies made in the late 2000’s on the effects of print media versus the digital media.

In a study by Millward Brown in 2009, it was found that print media left a more significant footprint in the reader’s memory, creating a stronger emotional response than its digital equivalent.

Thinking back to all the books of my youth and comparing them to the jungle of digital media we go through today, it makes a lot of sense. But at what point do the ecological downsides of print media weigh down the neurological benefits?

E-books or real books?

It is easy to agree that holding an actual book or a magazine definitely beats swiping through an article or an e-book on a digital device. There’s just something about the materials and including all the senses that makes the experience much more exciting: the feel of the paper, the smell of the freshly printed magazine or an old book, the texture of the covers and the dust jacket. No wonder people are still very interested in buying books. But in an increasingly environmentally conscious world, how long can we really make excuses for printed magazines, when it’s so easy to just have it online instead?

In an article written by Alex Preston for The Guardian in 2017, Preston researches the reasons behind the surge in interest towards printed books in the recent years. Trough interviews with publishers and bookshop owners, it became clear to see that books have become more than a thing to read: unlike their electronic counterparts like the Kindle, books have become pieces of decorations, even status symbols, for some people. Publishers around the world have noticed the growing amounts of people wanting to buy a beautiful book, resulting in more and more beautiful book designs and clever layouts. So is printing books still more ecological than buying devices to read them on?

According to The New York Times, taking into account the fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption it takes to produce an e-reader device, the impact of one e-reader to the environment equals roughly 40 to 50 books. And how many people will really read that number of books on their device before upgrading it to a new model? Quite few, I would say.

Conscious design

So, what can we do as designers? Even though the education of graphic designers and journalists is increasingly focusing on online content and digital media, it’s quite safe to say that a great number of designers still design for print media. It might even be a preferred option for us – which one of us hasn’t dreamed of designing a beautiful book, or getting to publish a visually innovative magazine? The payback of designing something you get to physically hold in your hands is so much bigger than seeing your work just float on a website somewhere in cyberspace. Call it materialistic, or call it daydreaming, but there is a print designer in all of us. Surely there’s something we can do to keep printing as a viable option even in the future?

Great projects come along year after year with ideas for a more ecological future for the print media. The eco-friendly typeface trend has brought great options for ink-saving fonts, such as the Ryman Eco typeface designed by Grey London, and advertisement agency in England. By reducing the solid areas of a typeface, Ryman Eco manages to reduce the use of ink by 30% compared to most used typefaces.

So, the designers now have the option to use more eco-friendly typefaces, but how about the paper? In the future, the survival of the printed word really comes down to the production of paper. The market is already full of ecological, recycled choices, but as designers, we need to create the trends to fully utilize these assets. It can be very easy to find a recycled paper to be compromising your design, but instead we should think of the opportunities it brings – work our design into it. Crazier things have become trendy in the past, but why not make it trendy to be environmentally conscious in your design? After all, the responsibility of making ecological choices falls to the designer, and it is up to us to make the printed products a sustainable option. The change to a greener way of printing has to come from us, because in order to get supply, the ecological materials must have demand.

Only by changing our own mindsets can we keep print media in the curriculum of the graphic designers of the future.