From Print Designer to Print Architect
Print Architect: a role that needs more exposure.
ARTICLES
From Print Designer to Print Architect
For years I have been working on publishing products, diligently applying all the composition rules, the best practices, my personal ideas about good publishing, the experience learned from my mistakes, suggestions from my mentors, and tips from the pressmen.
The general "iter" has always been focused on customers needs by understanding their necessities through a session of comprehensive questions, before moving on to drafting and sketching the general grasp on paper and then lastly to execute on the DTP software. In the digital era, however, is through the full knowledge of your DTP software that you materialize your professionalism as Print Designer: you know your stuff, you know your tools, you understand the product and you know how to get it done fast. This is what is expected from your employer or client, because this is your duty as Print Designer.
The use of DTP software to create editorial products is nowadays a consolidated discipline, we have now excellent software on both proprietary and open-source space, that truly empower the skills and the creativity of any expert Print Designer. However, despite the technology, products like books are still made essentially as in the early days of movable-type printing, with the designer going through page to page to fix proportions, widows and orphans, and tuning and tweaking every small detail that makes a book perfect.
Crafting a book, or a news magazine, page by page is a consolidate workflow, and for many products that make an aggressive use of the composition to stand out the content, is the only practical way.
The Print Architect
Print Architects may have existed even before modern Print Designers, as a matter of fact TeX was first released by Donald Knuth in 1978 while Aldus PageMaker in 1985, seven years later. However Print Architects never left their niche and with the improvement of increasingly better DTP software they continued to operate in the less visible corners of Commercial Printing.
Print Designers and Print Architects work on the same products and they overlap in many areas, however, even if they can deliver the same exact product what changes is the methodology and the tools they use. Print Designers design the specs and then operate page after page applying the rules they created. Print Architects instead, can design the specs or take over defined ones, then they start to design the internal processes the product must follow in order to build itself; they use different tools, and basically they program the editorial product. However programming a software or programming a book is not the same thing: a book, for instance, has physical properties, fonts have dimensions, surfaces chemical properties, these and even more details must be taken in account by Print Architects.
Print Architects must think in four dimensions and refine their abstract thinking skills, especially when coming from a Print Design background: all composition rules and best practices need to be translated into abstracted instructions, built around the final product specs. From the perspective of Print Architects the composition is that dynamic balance that makes the visual and the reading of a product pleasant, therefore even a change of few points in some of the layout elements can completely alter this equilibrium.
Print Architects are responsible to maintain the equilibrium between the parts under rigid constraints, they cannot take advantage of their own personal sensibility by toying with perceptive adjustments, and they must think in the fourth dimension of time and understand what will happen from page 1 to page 5000, and even though this can happen in few minutes, the process cannot be paused and dynamically adjusted, they must foresee to avoid continuing iterations although working on a smaller section is the common workaround, when a section work by cascade is applied to the whole product.
The tools made the difference
From the Print Architects point of view the processes and internal mechanisms are relevant to produce a print-ready PDF document. The approach to a physical object is totally distinct from the construction of a modern web page, such as an e-commerce catalog for instance. On the WWW side the effort has been focused to make the layout fluid and responsive, precisely the action to call and apply different CSS rules to adapt the layout to the current view-port, that brought the concept of dynamic layout elements like flex-box and then grid. On the printing side things work differently, the software must calculate how much space is left on the page, usually the algorithm to manage the text is handled by the tool, but what happens on each page is decided by Print Architects, through the rules they have implemented to follow the design project. Based on these rules the content can be shrunk, split, or placed on the entire page, this sounds trivial but in reality requires an in-depth analysis because each project is a totally different world, and must be approached differently.
Nonetheless typesetting is a practical task, in the past, at the origin of the movable types, books were manufactured and edited exactly when they were printed. Today a published product goes through an intermediate digital phase before reaching its final form, but the core is always the same. I would dare to say that is still one of the few jobs where the tools determine what you are: if you manufacture a book with traditional tools you are an artisan or a craftsman, if you use your favorite DTP software you are a Print Designer, and if you decide to program it, in the most pure meaning of this verb, you are a Print Architect. But what happens when you push this logic one step further and start engineering the process itself?
What if you are a Print Engineer?
This is of course a play on words, but it is not a false statement. When you abstract enough the building elements of your internal architecture you are engineering your product to be content-agnostic. This is how Advanced Grid Layout (AGL) was born: it originated from a complex and huge B2B catalog that became my reference. The history of its various iterations were analyzed and reduced into building blocks; the dissecting was based on specific axioms that work as a solid foundation, summing up what I stated in the introduction. Once the building blocks were defined they were abstracted to be as generic and broad as possible, and rather than following a monolithic approach I made them modular, grounded in that same axiomatic foundation. AGL is granularly engineered and modularity is its pivotal feature. Print Engineering is mostly related to how some aspects can be improved regardless of whether in the hands of designers or pressmen.
Wrapping this up
There is not a competition between the two figures, the main distinction is about volume. Print Designers are mostly paid per hour, so letting them work many hours on a project can make it unworthy; on the other end, the "Architect" is better suited to work per project, but engaging one for a 50 page job would be extremely expensive. The Print Designer and the Print Architect can work together, and that is exactly what I had in mind when I created AGL: the "Designer" creates the layout, the "Architect" creates the rules and the blocks to build it. AGL uses a hybrid approach: the "Architect" provides tunable blocks and flexible rules, the "Designer" tunes them to reflect the branding, AGL does the rest.