No business card? (This is a very foreign idea to graphic designers!) “Trying to be environmental, save paper,” the fellow explained. Uh, okay… Website then? You MUST have a website… right? Nope. Now, in this day and age that’s pretty unacceptable. Okay, well, give us your email address then. Guess what, no email either! That’s okay for my grandmother, but how can you function in business without email???

This company had nothing. Nada. No business cards, no website, just a cell phone number. (Isn’t that how drug dealers operate?) Every time we discovered some other piece of basic business stationery or a digital trace of his company that was missing, the man became less real. He sort of vanished before our very eyes.

Maybe he couldn’t afford it, you say. Okay, I’ll give you that on a fancy, huge, dynamic website (options there too!). But there are many options for acquiring affordable company stationery. And it’s true that with email and online operations, there is less need nowadays for printed letterhead, but a business card is something affordable and easy to carry around (and give out!) that will remind your contacts of your business after you’ve parted. A business card legitimizes your company, advertises its capabilities, and shows people how� they can find you, literally or virtually. That’s a lot for 3.5 x 2 inches!

As it was with this man and his “company,” without company stationery, you pretty much don’t exist. There was no proof that he did what he said he did. No example of his operations. It was inexcusable and needless to say, we lost any interest in working with him. (What guy? Where’d he go?). I mean, even con artists get cards printed! It’s inexcusable because with digital printing, there are many possibilities for having company stationery created afforadably. Now, I mentioned having a website as necessary too – but that’s a tale for another day.

One main thread throughout the evening’s discussion was that of “be true to the medium.” Many good ways of thinking about designing for the web were presented: print design gives “a speech,” web design has “a conversation” (Khoi Vinh, New York Times) and we’re not just designing stories, we’re designing “ways INTO stories” (Ian Adelman, New York Magazine). Could go on and on about those!

But what also came out of using either medium to its truest and fullest was what may be a printed piece’s strength: some of us (and this will no doubt change as younger generations grow more accustomed to reading more on a screen) still like to read longer articles and stories in a “hard copy” format, and not necessarily sitting in front of a computer. As one panelist put it, printed magazines are good for “lush feature wells” – really long articles with beautiful pictures. True, for now. However, since a lot of us haven’t bought a newspaper in some time – I agree that “an online newspaper is a better newspaper” because it does better at what a newspaper should do – I think our reading habits are going to keep changing.

Magazines will likely be around for awhile yet, and possibly become more of a niche-market, specialized thing. But it’s inevitable that reading preferences are going to evolve to more screen-friendly practices (Kindle, anyone?). In fact there’s a new book out, iBrain, about how technology is influencing “brain function and behavior” (with a lot about social interaction). Yes, that does sound scary. But I guess as designers, we can’t keep fighting the current, we have to find ways to swim in it.