Brand and Print, Brand and Print, Brand and Print!

Dear Designer,

I hope that your week is going well so far.

After a hard run on Saturday, the topic for today’s post became more clear — a renaissance of design for brand identity and printed matter.

Why is that? I have been reading about and listening to journalists about the advent of Google Zero.

What’s Google Zero? It’s a time, coming soon, when the open web, that beautiful and bountiful system of interconnected websites that I, you and so many others have put at the centre of our design and development work, withers.

It’s worse than Doctorow’s enshittification, in which platforms and applications devolve into commoditized content that no longer make sense to the users that have contributed so willingly to them. Google Zero means the slow collapse of indexing (and therefore searching for and finding) unique, independent, or otherwise human-crafted content. The search engine that made money indexing and promoting the web could be in an eat-your-tail tale.

It may not be that dire, if you believe Google. But let’s review?

AI machines have scooped up the library of the internet that we built and created over 30 years. Large, highly capitalized companies captured our code, our content and our communities. They are now aggressively looking into our emails, private networks and any unusual platforms that might benefit the beast. The result is a frighteningly accurate and performant AI that is nonetheless astounding.

Google, the self-proclaimed guardian of the indexable internet (“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) is now pushing its AI summaries on the 92% of us who use their search, thereby obviating the need to scroll. I find myself reading these summaries often and unwittingly — why would I click on a link to some random, potentially spammy website when Google has already done the heavy lifting of researching and presenting the results?

The outcome is less human traffic on websites and far more time spent no Google and Gemini. (A number of SEO folks told me recently that web traffic to most of their sites are down by 40–60%; I believe them.)

As a graphic designer, what does all of this mean for us?

Permanence, as we know, is an illusion of the world.

If the web is now in a dissipation phase, there are other signs that digital design may be evolving towards a new state. Social media is being regulated nationally in New Zealand, Brazil and now France. Online newsletters, blogs and sites are becoming simpler and ever more columnar (see Dear Designer) for reasons of accessibility to people and GEO. Design platforms are integrating no-code AI solutions into products. And site building tools are cheaper and better than ever.

I truly love digital production and the immense and egalitarian reach it offers. I think there will always be an open and independent web, so long as we support and advocate for standards, open source technologies and creative independence. An open web is the only way to project and protect a democratic one.

But what if?

If digital scenarios slide, we still have brand and print.

Yes, there will be a day when machines design identities (logos, design systems and standards, etc.) and printed matter. But the likelihood that it will be done well — creating substantial, long-term, strategic, quirky, innovative visual brands and superb printed materials coupled with wonderful content seems less likely.

Why is brand and print an exception? Three ideas I can offer:

1. Organizations will continue to need what designers have always offered: clear differentiation, energetic presentation and direct communications. The same logic will apply. Governments, nonprofits and corporations of all sizes will need forward-thinking, crafty and clear-headed designers to build out sustainable products, compelling campaigns and cool kits.
2. AI will become more expensive. We are already starting to see enterprises throttling their platforms for internal users. The $20-per-month-per-person subscription will buy less and less compute, making the human labour and ingenuity of design even more valuable. Coding a site will be cheaper than building out a brand identity and a novel print campaign.
3. Finally, graphic design is rooted in identity and print. Every designer is a link in a sprawling, multidirectional chainlink fence of visual history that connects the printing press to the PowerPoint. Perhaps there will come a day when all things digital are machined and all things analogue are humaned. Design is a fundamentally aesthetic (humane, spirited and empathic) endeavour, not a computational one.

Also this, from Mandy Brown:

Intelligence has never been an objective quality that can be ascertained the way we measure the (actually increasing) carbon in the atmosphere. It is a political device that preserves power and care for those deemed worthy of it, and which simultaneously withdraws such care from everyone else.

I don’t mean to overstate it. Digital and web will be around for a while. But if I was a young designer today, say between the ages of 25 and 50, a career of focusing on visual identity, typography and print makes a lot of sense to me.

Maybe in a few years, it will be more like something out of the Stranger Things years (1983 to 1987): printed nonprofit newsletters, quarterly corporate reports and annual product catalogues sent to customers who eagerly open their metal mailboxes, this time to momentarily escape their phones, watches, earbuds and sunglasses?

Thank you for reading, dear designer. See you next week.

Yours,

P.S. You might notice that Dear Designer looks a little different. I’m sending this via Ghost, instead of Substack. If this ended up in your spam, I hope you’ll move it to your primary inbox and add this address to your contacts. And if you’re new here, welcome.

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