Turning a Page With Book Trailers

I used to tell my clients that there would always be a need for print, if for no other reason than to drive people to websites. Of course social media changed all that. Much of the printed communication I design now could be done more effectively, and far less expensively, online. The other day I ran across a phenomenon that drove home just how decisively the tide has turned. Book trailers now drive people to print on the web. If you don’t know what a book trailer is, it’s just what it sounds like: a short film promoting a book, on the model of a movie trailer. Granted, these videos support the medium of ink on paper, and the best of them celebrate the book form. But the technological implication is unmistakable: print’s role in the communication landscape has moved from the center closer to a sideline.

In the past five years, the demand for print design in my practice has actually increased. Perhaps this is the result of several factors. Worldwide, universities have woken up to the value of marketing, and the academic environment has come under new competitive pressures. But print quantities for each project have plummeted as mailing lists become more highly targeted and audiences become more precisely segmented. Less of my design group’s time is devoted to collateral — brochures, newsletters, etc., and more of it is devoted to environmental print — billboards, banners, bus wraps and the like — which won’t (yet) fit economically on a screen. The trends have been clear for a while, but the pace and inexorability of their march is just coming into focus for me.

There will always be a need for print, but it will move more and more to the realm of artisans and boutiques, and when it’s used for marketing will be reserved for high end campaigns with a need for a special wow factor and a budget to support it. (I suppose on the other end there will always be direct mail, too, but it remains to be seen how the new postal realities play into that.) Right now in my field there is only one pressure slowing this trend, and that’s client skepticism.