Print Is Making a Comeback. Three Things to Know Before You Dive In.

Speaker A: Right now, print design is making a comeback because people want something tangible. And so I want to talk to you about three things that you can keep in mind as you're thinking about ways to get your brand in the tangible world as a response to all of the online technology that exists. Hey there. My name is Dan. I own Brand shepherd. This is our 20th year in business, 2026, that is. And in field notes, I like to just pop on here and, and in around 10, 15 minutes, give you an update on what I see happening in the world of brand building and give you some tips and some kind of practical use along the way. So, as I mentioned, what I'm seeing right now is, uh, a natural response. This is the pro human, the pro tangible world, the analog sense of things that is, uh, making a very strong comeback right now. And people want to get their brand into a physical or tangible form. Form. This could be print. This could be something tangible like a, um, I don't know, a water bottle or, um, a notepad. It could be some kind of object, uh, that you put your brand on to have a brand experience. Apparel is, is really hot right now. And even a brochure I saw yesterday, uh, two different brands on LinkedIn promoting, uh, their latest brochure to contact the brand, to have a paper brochure, uh, mailed out to customers. And I thought, wow, this is so interesting. Uh, print is how I got my start in, in this world, in this industry. And so it's, it's just fascinating, um, to see it come back and to come back with, uh, with such strong interest. So I want to give you some tips. I have three things that I have in mind that I would, I think, would help you as you're trying to wrap your mind around. Hey, how do we get back into print? Or maybe we've been a digital brand and this is our first entry into print. We. What are some things that might be blind spots for you? And I want to make sure you know what to think about. So, number one is color. When you're talking about putting ink on paper, we have to talk about a very different world than a, uh, digital or a light representation of color. And so you have to change your expectations on color because it's going to be different, especially if you're a very particular person about your brand. Colors in the specific hues and saturations of your color. Um, you cannot just, uh, take the color logo that you have on your, on your computer or your phone and ship it off to a printer and have it Get a one to one replication. That's just not going to happen. Uh, you're going to have to expect, you're going to have to ask the printer to make adjustments for a one to one replication or you're going to have to work with a design specialist who knows how to adjust the cmyk which is your inks, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Um, adjust those so that um, so that it gets that one to one representation. This uh, throws a lot of people off because they, the common thing I hear is that our colors look muted, it doesn't look as vibrant, all this stuff. And that's to be expected when we're, when we're working with color on a screen those colors are being represented by pixels and light. When we're looking at our same brand on a substrate like paper or some kind of physical object, it's made with ink. Just two extremely different types of media. I mean they're just physically different substances altogether. So you have to change your expectations and be accommodating to hey, it might look a little different. This is why if you um, if you start noticing this in the wild you'll see that you know like brands that you see every day, like I don't know, Tide or Coke or Apple or whatever, the colors that you see on product packaging is not as vibrant as what you see in uh, our online, in ads and websites and apps and stuff like that. So number one is color. Just adjust your expectations. Either be prepared for a slightly muted version of your brand's color or ask your printer to adjust accordingly or work with a design specialist to uh, who knows, print to get that one to one replication. Okay, number two is tangential to color and that is a shift that's happened just in the last decade, might be probably even a little bit shorter. And that is the move away from Pantone colors. Pantone is a uh, is a color company. They, they make colors, they have colors of the year. They uh, they have a special code. You have to have a license to use their colors, uh, and their inks. Now here's the deal. This is a little inside baseball for you. So for decades, I mean decades since Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop launched and, or shortly thereafter Pantone uh, and Adobe were BFFs. They were you know, two peas in a pod. And all Adobe apps shipped with a free built in swatch tool that allowed us creatives and any designer to use and spec a Pantone color that was a one to one replication of the uh, of the, the non Pantone color that was being used in the design. So for instance, if you had a Pantone, uh, I don't know, blue, uh, or if you had a CMYK M blue, an RGB blue, you could find the Pantone color. It was just a few clicks away, not a big deal, you could get it done. But then, uh, it's, you know, the aftermath is difficult to say who, who shot first, but there was, there was a tiff between, there was a, uh, there was a fight between Adobe and Pantone and the designers, the design community, the creative community ended up being the losers of their war. Um, Adobe no longer carries Pantone and it's hard to tell if that was Pantone insisting on a, uh, licensing fee that creatives would have to pay or maybe Adobe was paying that already and wanted to pass it on to designers. Who knows? At this point the end result is the same and that is that we no longer have access to these tools. And then when we had to go to Pantone and uh, start using the colors through Pantone and not through Adobe anymore, we saw we had to feel that cost. And uh, it seems, I don't know this for fact, but it seems like Pantone took advantage of that and increased their costs. So not only were we paying something that we had not had to pay for in the past for decades. Again this was a tried and true thing. This was a, this is a feature that expectations had been set and met for decades and then it was taken away and then we were asked to charge for no good reason. There was no added benefit, no, no new features, just, yeah, it was free. Now you gotta pay for it. End of story. Uh, so we ended up having to pay for it and creatives all over the world basically just kind of shrugged it off and said, we just won't use you guys anymore. We'll just do straight CMYK and RGB and call it a day. And that's the best practice. Right now Pantone is out. Uh, there are some brands that still use Pantone. They're out there and if you're a printer who's invested in the Pantone system, they're going to ask you to um, your brand to spec a Pantone color not out of the best interest of your brand, but out of the best interest of them getting the most out of their license. So do not use Pantone unless you absolutely have to. It's no longer a best practice, it's no longer an expectation. Its designers, uh, are no longer using Pantones, um, by default. Uh, you know, everything has an exception and you're going to find some, some Pantone users still out there. But uh, by and large Pantones are out and just using a strict CMYK and RGB build is in. And the third and final thing that I would equip your brain with as you get into uh, doing some more tangible things with your brand is to greatly expand your expectations on timing the physical representation of your brand. Whether it's a brochure, apparel, some kind of item, it just takes longer. We're working in the physical world. Digital, uh, is part of the process, but it's nowhere near as fast as the digital world. And this has to be said because it's just something that needs to be part of your process and your timing and expectations. As things move through the system you have to be able to do uh, what uh, needs to get done, but it has to be done in a way that you're accommodating for the amount of time that it requires. So for instance, a good print run might take anywhere from a week or two, could take a little bit longer depending on what the printer is doing, how many press runs are ahead of you, things like that. So think factoring time. You're no longer going to be able to expect a quick change. Uh, you're going to have to accommodate some extra time and a good project management system or a good project management mindset will take care of that for you. Those are three things. Adjusting your uh, expectations on color, no longer expecting Pantone to be part of the system by default, and in fact moving away from Pantone, and then factoring the time needed for the physical representation of your brand. Those are all things that you need to keep in mind when you're working in the physical world. There's a lot more that could be said, a lot more than just uh, three things about the print world and physical representations of your brand. But these are all things that people seem to be very interested in and I'd be happy to talk with you if uh, there's something that you would like to work on for your brand in the physical sense. But uh, if not, hopefully this has uh, been been helpful to help you get somewhere along the way. Thanks for listening to Field Notes. We'll see you next time.