Print designs face a ‘yawn’ factor

There is a depressing sameness about printed material.

Take a good look at advertisements, newsletters, flyers, and the thousands of official and promotional forms that are regularly thrust under your face. Increasingly, they look alike – the same designs, colours, styles (or lack of) etc etc.

I know it’s a long bow, but we could be forgiven for thinking that graphic design for print has run out of ideas.

It stands to reason that there are a finite number of ways that type, images and logos etc can be arranged on a page and a document.  That number is  high, but it’s still finite.

But, I think it also has a lot to do with the evolution of desktop publishing programs that ‘dumb down’  output to  a bland template style – somewhat like website content management systems.  Using these modern ‘out-of-the-box’ publising programs is not rocket science ….. and the finished product increasingly seems to be reflecting that fact.

Of course, technology and the social web in particular offers salvation for the print graphic designer.  The only problem is that this is a whole new ‘Gen Y’ world in which the ‘First, we need a logo’ thinking so central to Marketing 101 is redundant.

Inventing a new font every month and stretching the uses of Photoshop to its limits may keep the wolves at bay for a while, but like the tide, it will be hard to hold back the impact of a wave of mediocrity.