Hotcards, Full Color Printing In The Nation

…are we headed for a new, web-wide world?

There seems to be little point in fighting it. Every day, web design and print design are coming closer together. Elements are jumping the fence, experts in one field are being asked to design for the other, and any printer or advertiser claiming to provide a 'complete' service has to create collateral that transfers effectively over both media.

And perhaps this Vulcan-esque design meld is never more obvious than when we look at logos. A recent feature in The New York Times points out that many major brands are redesigning their logos in favor of a "friendlier, more approachable" style.

As author Bill Marsh suggests, colors are getting lighter, edges are getting rounder, and warm, gentle touches of sparks and greenery are replacing harsh power-symbolism.

Huge brands like Wal-Mart, Kraft, Packard-Bell, and Target are making the change. Why? According to Marsh, it’s because the recession is the key issue of 2009, much as going green was the focus of 2008. Hence, while we saw a lot of eco-friendly logo revamps last year, this year is dedicated to making ourselves look, to be perfectly frank, less like corporate monsters.

Good point, but I think it misses the underlying trend that’s happening here. Big business is redesigning to weather the recession, sure, but their choice of direction is motivated not by a desire to look soft and fuzzy, exactly, but by a need to compete with online business. These companies are emulating the look of the web 2.whatever generation in order to capitalize on consumer response to that world. Fresh, modern, friendly – if big brick and mortars can make consumers feel about them the way we feel about, say, Google, or iPods, or Barack Obama, then perhaps the old way of doing business can survive.

Whether or not this will actually work returns me to my original point about closing the gap between web and printing design. One of the big changes Marsh notes in his NYT piece is the transition from dark colors to light. "Make it a joyful sky blue," he writes, "not dark, corporate-titan navy."

Of course, this is precisely the difference between traditional print and modern web design. Print logo designers – say, whoever came up with Wal-Mart’s original brand – would have recommended a color that popped out at a distance, wasn’t lost against a blue sky, and looked equally good on paper as on a marquis. On the web, however, this is hardly a consideration, and colors tend to lean more towards opalescent blues that appeal to the eye close up, and on screen.

In this light, the redesign of the corporate logo is a perfect example of web design coming to print. And imagine how different the world will look once this redesign of our print culture is complete. Once all print collateral look like webpages, and storefronts look like ecommerce homepages, the world will indeed be a different place. This isn’t the end of print design, but it is the beginning of a new kind of print design, and perhaps, an entirely new urban environment, one that may look, at times suspiciously, at times comfortably, a lot like the world we live in online.