Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

Check out For Print Only to find out!

Life is funny. Just a couple of years ago, it was hard to find information about printing online. Web-to-print services were just starting out, and there were only a handful of real 'print authorities' contributing to a web-based print discussion on anything like a regular basis. Most interestingly, there were very few print designers talking about and showing off their work on the web.

Today, as print struggles against the looming threat of extinction (and I mean threat not so much in the 'impending' sense as in the 'receiving death threats on a daily basis' sense), all of a sudden, everybody's online. And all of a sudden, printers and print designers are using the very medium that menaces our future to communicate the enduring vitality of our craft. Like I said, life is funny.

As a perfect example of this emerging trend, take a look at the fabulous new branch of UnderConsideration – FPO (For Print Only). Each post on FPO features a print design project and examines its creation process in detail. Print method, paper stock, production time, and even project cost are detailed in usually well-photographed entries.

So far, FPO is welcoming submissions from anyone who's got a cool print design project in the works. What qualifies as cool? Letterpress, silkscreen, hand-finishing, embossing, engraving, scoring, die-cutting, things that fold up into cool 3D shapes…the list goes on, and should be a great source of inspiration and cross-industry dialogue as the archives grow.

The question is: will print's increasingly robust online presence help it grow? What happens when a piece of print design is seen more on the web than in print? Will the concept of print-and-print-design-for-the-web cancel itself out, like a time travel story about a future self meeting a past self and creating a rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum? Can we design print for the web without falling into an anachronistic black hole? Keep watching FPO et al. and find out.