Kelly Lineman

I agree that print will not disappear any time soon. For one thing university professors will always want to see their books on the school bookshelf. From my personal perspective. I do not like scanning QR codes. I don’t want my phone, or the QR destination, knowing that much about me. I have, and will, walked out of restaurants if they do not have a print menu. I also feel there is a trend away from digital. Not to say that people are leaving the internet. Vinyl recently surpassed CDs in sales. I think books are the same way. People are starting to go back to books because of the tangible aspect of books. Like you I hope the print world never goes away. Hopefully the old saying is true: Everything old is new again.

Whew! A lot to unpack here. As a former college print journalism major, this hurts, but its been a long time coming.

Commerce printing is certainly going to take a hit, as businesses around the world navigate COVID. I think that was inevitable shift when it came to business, it just took a major catalyst like a global pandemic to spur industry into action. The technology, for the most part, was already there and just needed to be adopted.

However, when it comes to what I’m going to define as “leisure printing” (books, magazines, etc) I agree with your point about the human desire for physical objects. Sean makes a good point when comparing books, and other leisure prints, to vinyl — over the last few years we’ve certainly seen the decline of major publishing houses and magazines, but niche, independent print retailers have been on the rise.

Wow Kelly – really enjoyed reading this post! My sister is 7 years younger than me and our school experiences are extremely different. Advanced technology was JUST entering the classrooms for me – I remember taking a computer class to learn how to type in 1st grade. My class was also the first to no longer implement cursive as part of our study plans, and with that I never learned how to write in script. I remember when SMARTBoard’s just started to enter our classrooms (which now I don’t even think it’s a thing…), and if we wanted to use a laptop in high school we had to grab it from a rental cart. My sister barely experienced the weight of textbooks, and now that she just started high school she tells me there’s no need to use a locker cause all she needs is the laptop the school provided for her. Crazy how times have practically changed – and how swift the move to digital was for education. My class was the first to experience a lot of new innovations, and even so we still relied on textbooks and our notebooks to write.
I tried to get into digital books, but there is something about owning the copy of the book itself and having it on a bookshelf makes the experience more inviting. I do think there is still a need of print, but it certainly has suffered tremendously. We barely have printed photos of my sister as a baby, but it’s my mom’s biggest regret that it’s stored on various computers and hard drives. I think what happened was that people forgot that there is still an underlying want and need of having a physical photo in your hands. Or a card. Or a letter….
We still need these physical memories to hold onto and reflect. I still try to keep things analog when I can. 😉

I really like how you mention that you enjoy a well designed menu. I too, have always enjoyed this aspect of a restaurant experience. It is an understatement that some restaurants do it better than others. I have actually judged restaurants if they had a poorly designed menu (I am a graphic designer too). The worst is when the menu doesn’t make any sense and is poorly designed, but you can tell that an actual designer did it. One thing I will say though, is I am not sure that it is negatively affecting the restaurant experience. I think the whole restaurant experience is becoming more informal altogether, and in some ways that is not a good thing. For instance, when I used to go out to dinner I’d expect the server to give a welcome us with a small speal, tell me about specials, try to upsell a drink or glass of wine, and really try to make it an experience. But now I noticed often, that a server won’t do any of those things, and just take my order. It seems like the industry is getting lazy. But I agree that there is a special place for print, especially with us designers. Thanks for sharing, Kelly!

Wow! I totally feel you on this one. Ironically, my daughters and I were sorta talking about this VERY topic just this morning during our weekly Sunday Brunch. I asked them to bring their printed journals and planners to the meeting. We laid them all out, touching them and comparing the styles, various washi tape used, and other customizations. We had to laugh at ourselves over the way we were were carrying on over books when we have access to online tools that do the same thing… some might say even better.
I asked them a simple question, “Does this make sense?” After much back and forth we finally agreed that our online tools are just flat out better… HOWEVER… not so fast. The trophy still goes to our printed journals and planners. Hands down. We decided today that we are not giving them up. In fact, we doubled down and made a commitment to actually use them past the first month!
Our reason was exactly what you stated above in your touching sentiments about the journal for the mother whose baby was born premature or the card for the person who lost a loved one. The physical touch makes a difference. There is something downright magical about it.

Hi Kelly-Nice to meet you.

Thank you for sharing the feedback from the conference, I did see you did send out the information on the conference to the class prior and was disappointed that i could not attend due to my schedule. One of my personal/professional goals is to familiarize myself with these programs, there is so much out there and available that can help one or organizations save money when outsourcing creative needs..

It is pretty amazing how AI is utilized just by one click that can alter so much! I too am interested in seeing how this evolves…maybe i’ll lose those 20 lbs I’ve been trying to lose since the new year.. 🙂

This is crazy stuff. I have lots of pictures I would love to run through this program to make me look better. There are a lot of great things that we can do with this. However, like anything, a small group of people will misuse it. This makes me think of all the deepfake conversations I have been reading about. I would be interested in your thoughts on these programs being used to spread disinformation and unrest throughout the world?

Wow Kelly! This is awesome! I am also a huge fan of photoshop and tried to tune in as much as possible to the Adobe MAX conference. This is amazing that with one click you can change some amazing photos or expressions. I also saw some of these amazing AI changes in Adobe Premiere. They keep making harder tricks easier and easier. For instance, Adobe created a new way to make a mask that is 1000x easier. With just one click I can mask someone and throw a different background behind them. This is truly astonishing. Soon enough we will be able to just tell Adobe what we want done to our photo or video and it will happening! These updates have truly change the way I edit videos. I used to take me about 3 hours to edit a 2 minute video. Now it takes me maybe an hour depending on how many graphics are included but the main reason this process has speeded up for me so much is because of the new AI Adobe is constantly introducing. I look forward to seeing what is next from Adobe.

Kelly
This is truly a game-changer. Like yourself, I have used Adobe products for many years (+20) and this is a huge bonus for those of us that love to take landscape photography or creative portraits, and many times because of lighting we can’t get the perfect background/foreground balance. So If I am correct, we could use this new AI to add in a background that what otherwise would just be a washed-out sky! I’m excited to give this a try, thanks for sharing.

Hi Kelly! In the past 6 months, I have been starting to use the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite often. I know how to use Premiere Pro since I’ve been edited for years now. Lately though, I’ve been focusing mainly on Photoshop and Illustrator. I’ve recently started to learn how to use After Effects and I am loving it so far.

These new AI tools seem amazing! I love the background switch you showed here, it looks great! I definitely want to try out these features now.

What is your favorite software out of all of their products?

This is one of the most creative posts I have seen! I can see that you put a lot of work behind explaining how AI is changing the game in Photoshop and I have to see that I am very impressed! As a non-graphic designer and taking a basic course on the topic I have learned to appreciate the amount of work that goes into editing.

I found a great video that shows multiple examples of Adobe Sensei (the AI and machine learning technology used by Adobe) and it truly highlights how creativity can be enhanced through this innovative digital experience.

For anyone who has watched Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma”, I pose this question with an even deeper thought: Is your data worth your mental health?

Very helpful explaininer here! I’ve always wondered how much companies make off our data.

At $89 an email, I could totally see people selling their data off to buyers if they had the chance. Could we eventually see consumers gaining leverage by forming groups to sell their data together? Sounds like a Sci-Fi channel movie.

Great post! Re: Daniel’s idea about consumers banding together to gain leverage against big tech, Andrew Yang started a program/movement to do exactly that: https://www.datadividendproject.com

While I am pro data ownership and compensation, I think the most compelling argument against it is that people will just take the money, so I can see how some data privacy advocates don’t consider it a solution to the problem.

Sooo is my check in the mail orrrrrr……..

In all seriousness, this is something we need to combat. I’m not expecting everyone to delete social media and never use the web again, but something posed in Netflix’s “The Great Hack” we have to control our data leakage. Take the extra step and use a private browser like Brave or Iridium, Use Qwant, or DuckDuckGo when searching for things. Consider do you really need a FB, Twitter, Insta, Snap, TikTok, etc etc. Maybe limit yourself to one, and delete the others. The more people that do this the more control we gain back as users, Then and only then can we start affecting serious change. Great post Kelly.

Data is our currency in the digital market place. We should have a right to control it. However, I would ask, what counts as our data vs public data? Personal Identifying Information (PII) such as birthday, race, gender, and marital status is obviously private. However, is your email address private? I would argue that it is public in the same way your street address is public. Are the websites you visit private? What about the stores you shop at in a mall? If a store wanted to, could they have someone follow you in a mall and see where you shop and what you buy? There is no law against that and it is not any different than tracking your online shopping habits, just easier and cheaper for the companies to do it online.