Confessions of a Printaholic…

Dear sweet Web, how we all love you… but we can’t hold you in our hands, scribble in the margins or give you as a gift. Don’t be offended, it’s not you, it’s us. You still have your place, but we need something more…

I love the internet. It’s part of every day life (especially at an online printing company!). I love email, Facebook, my daily chats with the oracle of all knowledge (Google!) and oh my, I am addicted to Instagram. You can find out pretty much anything you ever wanted to know, listen to music, watch videos and communicate with the world.

That is until the servers go down. Like last Friday…

Fortunately, thanks to the technical wizardry that goes above and beyond my comprehension, it doesn’t effect the orders that flood in and out of our complex bleepy thingy-me-bobs. All I know, is that as a designer, it does make things very inconvenient! So during the hour or so where we had no online access, it made some of us here appreciate how much we really do love print. It doesn’t go offline, crash on you, or whirr away if it’s trying to compute something particularly strenuous!

There is nothing like holding a beautiful invitation or thick heavy book in your hands. If ever you need to read something in detail, how often do you end up printing it out and scribbling all over it? Or photos there are gazillions stored somewhere in “the Cloud”, but we only allow the very best to make the leap from cyber space to our living space.

There is nothing I love better than to curl up with a cuppa and a good book on my Kindle App, but the books I really love, line the walls at home, ready to fall open onto my favourite pages. Including piles of design books and stacks of design magazines that I refuse to throw out, all crammed with ideas. Cookbooks that I love to leaf through because they are gorgeous, not because I’m any kind of master-chef! Illustrated children’s books created as a work of art in themselves. So beautifully put together they make me feel instantly creative.

So as wonderful as it is, technology certainly hasn’t eradicated print. It has made it a choice. It may not always be a necessity, but to me it’s a much needed luxury. Something worth thinking about, investing into and doing well. I defy anyone to tell me that print is outdated, unloved or unnecessary. Pah! Get printing I say!

Yeah yeah OK, it may be kinda geeky…. but I know I’m not alone when I say…

My name is Lucy George…. and I am a printaholic.