When I walk the dog I sometimes bump into Brian walking his. Brian is in the very latter years of a career in print — he's an old school machine minder. Which makes it sound like less of a job that actually it is. Machine minders are/were the noble foot soldiers of the print industry. Their job is to mind huge offset presses maintaining optimum reproduction fidelity. And my job, as an old school graphic designer, was to make the machine minder's job as hard as I could. Demanding (they'd say) unreasonable standards of the minder, his press, and the print medium.
Today I am working exclusively on a computer monitor. And Brian’s litho press is surrounded by an army of digital printing machines. One day soon his Heidelberg Offset Press may find a place in the Science Museum. So we walk and talk like grizzled old soldiers from opposing Armies. We swap war stories of battles won and lost, displaying metaphorical war wounds. Fact is though, the war that Brian and I waged is still going on. It's irreconcilable. The cause is simple: the difference between radiated light and reflected light. I'd be holding up a transparency demanding the Brian I was facing at the time match it exactly. When all the poor old Brian had was CMYK printed on a sheet of paper. Radiated light and reflected light can never be reconciled. It is an optical fact. That doesn’t stop generations of graphic designers moaning at generations of Brians. And yes, sometimes the machine minders could have tried a bit harder. And sometimes the Graphic designers had a point.
But fact is, we weren’t fighting each other we were fighting science. But then comes digital printing and print-on-demand. And the whole reproduction landscape changes. But not the science. We, as graphic designers, are still trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. The image on the computer monitor is a radiated image and the image on a book cover is a reflected image. Difference is graphic designers no longer have a Brian to have a go at. We have to sort it out ourselves. Oh how I miss Brian. A book jacket can look brilliant on your Amazon authors page. But when it undergoes the digital printing process and it becomes duller/darker. And sometimes there can be an irritating variation in quality. Amazon represents amongst best print-on-demand quality out there (IMHO) but even it has its moments. Now you could be cynical on this point. All your marketing and sales happen online. Why compromise online impact to improve printed reproduction (after all, the sale had been achieved)?
Nevertheless, my job as a graphic designer is still to mediate between both mediums. But now I have to do it without the help of a Brian.
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