is print dead?

Posted by nancydick on
Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

posted by Nancy

(Let’s see if that blogpost title moves me up in the flipthemedia popularity contest!)
Tuesday evening’s Seattle Adobe InDesign User Group meeting took an interesting turn when the subject of repurposing from print to web came up. Resulted in a 30 minute side-trip into how to tease InDesign into writing decent XHTML that can fairly easily be massaged into a respectable web page.

For those who don’t follow the world of print very closely, InDesign is Adobe’s successor to PageMaker (or PageWrecker, as we used to lovingly call it for its distressing habit of eating perfectly good pages). InDesign has also replaced Quark as the page layout tool of choice for many small, medium, and even some large publishers. It’s used to publish books, newspapers, magazines, brochures, newsletters . . . if it’s in print, it may have been designed in InDesign. So it may seem curious that a group of 100 die-hard creative + printing pros might meander into a discussion about the web.

But I’m seeing the proverbial writing on the wall. My “print-only” students are finding it more challenging to be employable; those with the dual print-web skillset have the advantage. Some graduates who had good jobs in print are back learning Dreamweaver, HTML/CSS and Flash, as employers are asking for those skills.

XML-based publishing separates content from structure so that, for example, a “head1″ tag causes the content to look very different in a printed piece, website or mobile device. The structure is tagged once and the content repurposed many times. However, many print designers don’t know XML and would like to use their familiar InDesign layout tools to mock up and potentially generate webpages. They dream of a world where designs could more easily be deployed across a variety of media. (Interestingly, industry news reports have discussed a possible InDesign-to-Flash workflow in CS4.)

Print’s advantage over the web is permanence and portability. So, print’s not dead (long live print!), but it does need some new tricks up its sleeve to stay relevant in the online world.