The death of the printed word has been long-heralded, especially since the rise of the internet. Almost every science fiction film ever made has us reading our daily newspsaper from a device, not a paper page. The future, in all its glory, will make paper redundant.
So why have paper sales increased steadily since the internet's introduction?
It seems that the very mechanism that should be driving nails into paper's coffin (or recycling bin) is helping it survive, albeit at the expense of commercial printers.
The truth is that someday we may well see the end of print, but we have a long way to go first. Not least, we need to see cheap, pervasive devices that make information available everywhere, and that make reading text as comfortable as reading from paper. We are still many years from this dream. Sorry trees.
In the meantime, the internet is fuleing a new phenomenon: personal, relevant printing.
Today, we print more and more in our homes, and at our desks. Where we once called for the brochure, we now visit the web page. And more often than not, we print it. So instead of printing being a centralised, high volume activity, it is becoming a low volume activity that takes place in millions of locations.
In theory, this is a far more efficient use of paper: find the relevant page of information, like a holiday destination, then print it. No need for the other 200 pages of irrelevant paper. It's win-win: information owner spends less on print; consumer gets exactly what they need, instantly.
In practice, more pages are printed because people can actually find the information they need today, whereas in the past they would have accepted partial information over the phone, or lived in blissful ignorance. So in truth, the internet, in empowering people's access to information (and vastly increasing the quantity of information available) is simply altering the printing process. Web pages are now master files that we print from, not just pages we view on screen.
Which begs the question: why do most websites print out so poorly?
This is a serious issue, yet it is largely overlooked by owners and designers of websites. For the most part, a printed page from a website will be poorly formated by traditional print standards, and in many cases will lack much of the brand personality that the brand owner has worked so hard to build in other ways. The attitude has typically been: 'well that's what a web page looks like when it's printed'. The happy acceptance of such poor printed output is astounding. A print-out might sit on a desk for days after the site it came from has been left behind. A shoddy print-out is not exactly a great lasting impression of the organisation it represents.
There are many ways of addressing this issue, and it may have little to do with the design of the site itself.
The experience of consuming information from a PC screen differs greatly from that of paper. We have to consider each on its own merits and think carefully about how to deliver the best experience in each medium. (and we've not even touched on devices like handhelds).
As such, it may not be sensible to expect most websites to be the source of good printed output. A typical web page carries far more elements than are required for printed output, but that doesn't assign fault to the design of the web page itself. Simply put, interactive media is not a good source for print.
On screen we need active navigation elements to get us around. In print, we do not: we need visual hierarchy and navigation of a very different type. We've yet to see a successful drop-down menu in print, but here's hoping.
Does this mean that we should simply accept the internet as a poor source for print? Accept that all printed output from websites will be relatively poor and accept a position of 'well, this is how it is'?
Absolutely not. Instead, site owners should be looking at how high-quality printed output can be integrated into websites. No brand owner wants their customers taking away, and more importantly, keeping a shoddy printed record of their brand. No customer wants to take away printed pages that are unprofessionally formatted and hard to read.
There are two primary choices for good printed output: well-formatted, HTML pages; and attached PDF files. There are other technical solutions, but these are the only two really universally-accepted options.
A common approach, particularly for websites with dynamically-generated content, is to offer a 'printable' version of each page of content. Click on a 'print-ready version of this page' (or similar) link to pop open a new page with all the navigation stripped out, a text length restricted to a readable width, and the stylesheet set to an optimum setting for print. Black text on a white background, etc You get the idea.
This works well on the whole and gives acceptable output (though rarely is it anything to get excited about). Online publishers have typically adopted this approach because it is: a) cheap, as they are almost always database-driven sites needing only a new template or two; and b) commercially appealing as they can sneak a few adverts onto the printed page too.
Overall, this method is not perfect, but can be made to work very well.
A more modern HTML approach is to use a different stylesheet for printing purposes which gets dynamically loaded before the page prints. This is the best route, but is only possible in sites that have been developed to the most modern standards. It will not work with older browsers, but they are rapidly being left behind anyway.
Using PDF is a more challenging process, but can lead to the best quality output. PDF files can be produced to professional print standards and allow a full choice of typefaces and graphic elements (i.e. the logo will look like it should) to be used. They can also comfortably contain more text than the website, providing the opportunity to elaborate on a topic.
The downside is a production overhead. There are ways to automate PDF production, and this is a good half-way house between text-only HTML pages and manually produced PDF files, particularly for someone with a high volume of content. But the best results come from manually created documents that have been crafted to the same level as a 'real' printed document, and they take a little time and effort.
We feel that where possible, PDF is the favoured option. It's the approach we take for all our Viewpoint articles because we want the printed documents people take away to be as good as they can be when printed (to encourage people to read them, and maybe even pass them on). The same, surely, should apply to any brand owner.
PDF is far from perfect, and needs to be produced carefully to ensure that the files are download-friendly. Many people have used them as a cop-out to replace putting content on-screen. Many more create huge documents, with complex colour layouts, solid black page backgrounds and the like that make the print-out even worse than the website. But then a PDF file does not guarantee good design: you, as a brand owner have to do that (or at least demand it).
Every website today should have thought given to its printed output. As our printing habits continue to evolve (imagine when cheap, fast colour printers are everywhere), it is increasingly important that the lasting impression that so often lies in the printed page is taken seriously. The message is simple: make sure you make the effort, and save some budget, to make your site printable.
The pay-off will be a lasting impression your brand can be proud of.