Recently, I had the pleasure of travelling to Vancouver for Design Week to take part in the Icograda Design Currency conference. Vancouver’s design community is amazing, and while we do great corporate work in Toronto, western Canada seems to have a very organic quality. The conference was full of young artists listening to the talks while constantly doodling concepts in their Moleskine notebooks.
One of the conference highlights was the talk by Ben Hulse, design manager and Ali Gardiner, vice-president, brand and creative services from the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Organizing Committee (VANOC). They explained the process of designing the Olympics down to the last luge handle.
The conference touched on topics ranging from designing sustainable cities, to the craft of design, to designing emergency housing in disaster areas like Haiti. The purpose of the week was to explore the value of design. With amateur artists on the rise, it’s certainly a worthwhile discussion. Design as a profession is endangered by the masses of want-to-be designers out there.
However, I engaged in the discussion not as a designer but as a print professional; from this perspective, the discussions looked a little different. For example, at one point, a speaker asked, “Is anyone in this room old enough to know what a press check is?” Everyone laughed, but me. He was joking, of course, and it was completely obvious that the entire room was in love with all things print. Nonetheless, I felt like the butt of a joke and, even worse, I felt dated. So for the rest of the conference, I proceeded to advocate for our industry.
There are a couple of lessons that became apparent. Firstly, designers still need help understanding print production. We need to educate them so that they feel comfortable working with us. Secondly, given the number of media options is increasing, designers have to actively choose print. We need to show designers how print is relevant and beneficial. Lastly, I noticed something very interesting about designers. They are naturally entrepreneurial and creative. They force us to produce quotes on what seem like impossible jobs. In that sense, design can push us to use technology in new ways.
However, this is not to say that designers are more entrepreneurial than printers. I think that, generally, we have very innovative people in the graphic arts industry. In this month’s issue, we look at the entrepreneurial nature of print. Our lead article, written by yours truly, will investigate the role that entrepreneurship plays in three Canadian print businesses.
I encourage you to think about how you can engage the designers you work with. They hold the key to a lot of business opportunities. I charge you with the task of making print relevant in their eyes.
