Designers and Digital Print...The Good News

A couple of years ago, I lead a team of students and faculty who worked with Bob Wagner and Mike Riebesehl from Xerox to produce the Art and Science of Digital Printing, The Parsons Guide to Getting it Right. Back then, it was a pretty big deal. Now a group in Germany got together, decided what they wanted to do, sent it to Lulu.com and it has worldwide distribution. My guess is that the total printing cost was the $19 they are charging on the web. Ain't life grand?

I found the following at Speak Up, an author-based, reader-supported community devoted to graphic design open to conversation and dialogue.

"It's funny how things change. Five years ago I wouldn't have given second thought to producing print material with digital printing. No, only offset printing.. . . . More or less, the art of offset printing has been properly documented and even mastered. Now it's digital printing's turn.

Well, sort of. This past July, fourteen students attended a two-day workshop at Germany's Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences with Prof. Frank Philippin and London-based designer James Goggin.

. . .The result of the workshop is Dear Lulu, a fantastic and imaginative resource that puts digital printing to the test through a Do-It-Yourself presentation that fits right in with philosophy of print on demand that makes it such an alluring proposition for designers looking to publish with little financial risk and with pretty decent results in return.

Read the design brief here
You can buy a copy (96 pages) or download a full set of PDF for free here.