Hot off the presses

The digital age has revolutionized the creative industry. Darkroom magic tricks give way to the miracles of Photoshop, illustrators with pen and ink have been largely replaced by Illustrator (though not completely .... see our holiday cards for proof that this fine art is still alive and well!), and promotion these days is as much about social media and viral buzz as it is about media buys. For us in the field, this often changes the nature — though not, one hopes, the spirit — of the day-to-day work we do.

That’s why there’s something oddly fun about the printing and production process. Wait, wait — hear me out. Yeah, no one in their right mind likes 4 a.m. press checks or frantic calls from proofreaders on Saturday nights. But there’s something viscerally satisfying, at least for me, in getting to lay my hands on a piece we’ve created as it comes hot off the presses.

So few things in our line of work are tangible, tactile. We create websites and other interactive applications, but the work itself is something off in the ether (behold: my amazingly sad grasp of how the Internetz actually work ... ) You can click it, send it to a friend, tweet it ... but you can’t touch it. It’s a similar phenomenon for branding initiatives, in my eyes anyway. We may create an identity system and work on the collateral it generates ... but just as often, we hand off a logo, style guide, and identity system to the client, and step away (and pray that our hard work isn’t bludgeoned to death in bad in-house PowerPoint presentations and internal communiques .... but that’s another ballgame entirely!) Needless to say, this sense of distancing is true in our pure consulting work as well.

I’m not in any way complaining .... variety is the spice of life, and for a creative, it seems as necessary as trendy glasses and an iPhone. But it’s always a secret (not so secret anymore, I suppose) delight to work on a print project and see it through production. It’s nice to hold the finished product in your hands and think .... this is mine, my baby, my precioussssss .... (cue creepy music). It’s a nice reminder of the way things used to be, although I certainly wasn’t alive to see them that way! (Thank you, Mad Men.)

Anyway, that’s been the week’s experience for us ... a project we’ve been working on for months is at last at the presses (oh, more beautiful words have ne’er been spoken!) A more perfect end to our week could not be imagined!