Skip to main content

Printed Things I Miss

For the last several years, there are so many printed items that have disappeared and many more will be disappearing in the future. Here are a few items I miss.


1) Printed Ticket Stubs

We were on the way to a concert with our son and all of the sudden we realized we had forgotten the electronic tickets we printed out at home. My husband remembered that he had the electronic tickets in our drop box. When we got there, they scanned the tickets off of his phone. I miss those days when you put on a coat, you haven't worn in and while, and reach your hand in your pocket, and find a stub to a show you had gone to over a year ago. Last year I purchased a book for my son to save his ticket stubs. Unfortunately, he has to use pieces from our electronic print outs. This made me very nostalgic for the days when we had a ticket stub as a souvenir from the show.

2) Vinyl Albums Covers
I have saved all of my old vinyl albums and toted them across the country three times when I moved. The artwork on the cover represented the band and the music. If you were lucky, you got a poster and separate liner notes. My alphabetized album collection was, and still is, one of my prized possessions. Now we download our music, put it on the cloud, share it with others, load it on our phone, and swap songs on-line with friends. There is nothing tangible or iconic about an album or a song. I guess I'm showing my age but I really miss albums.

3) Books
I'm repeating myself with this blog because I have talked about electronic books before. I have tried to embrace this new technology. In theory, it sounds great to take this one gadget with you that holds all of your books, magazines, newspapers etc. I have downloaded a few books on to my iPad---cookbooks, fiction books, and the newspaper. I hardly ever read them and I have never used the cookbooks. Unless I have a book sitting on my nightstand or on a shelf, I forget I have it. There is something about the act of thumbing through the newspaper as well as fanning through a book (and peaking at the ending) that can't be replaced by electronics. I will continue to try but in the meantime, I have a ton of books sitting by my bed that need to be read.

Posted by: Patty Jensen

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Packaging: 10 Steps to a Better Process

1. Prioritize. Prioritize. Prioritize. When three people are talking to you, you can’t hear them all. The same is true for design. Visual priority must be established from the very beginning of the design process. If every item is given primary importance, nothing becomes important. The visual priorities are what drive how all creative will be judged. The design firm should include as part of their creative brief, a hierarchy of 5 communication points for the front of the package. This includes 1) brand 2) product name 3) why-to-buy statement 4) feature points 5) product image. 2. Come together. Everyone has an opinion, so clear project objectives are vital to any job. Consensus regarding the creative brief must be obtained from the people expected to judge the package design from within your corporation. Without this consensus, the design process will fall apart. Without clearly stated, agreed-upon objectives, you are not able to provide constructive feedback. As soon as you start t...

Let Your Packaging Sell Your Product, Not a Funny Name!

So I ran across this product while I was traveling in NY and needed some earplugs.  I can't sleep without them. Earplugs are notoriously hard to find on shelf so I had to scan many products. I came across this product and got quite a chuckle. I don't think I need to explain why (To be fair, it was awhile ago, and the package design could have changed since then.): Zim's Crack Creme---we can assume that Zim is the pharmacist who created this all-natural herbal wonder cream (creme) for your crack. Or is that really what this means. Surly it couldn't. We design packaging and I couldn't help but analyze this package as I would for a client. The first thing we help our clients do is to prioritize the elements on the front of the package. What is the most important thing to communicate? The name? The brand? The why-to-buy? The features? Obviously, Zim felt the name of the product was most important. But if the name of the product doesn't really convey what it doe...

Costco: The Good, The Bad & The Meh

Even though Costco doesn't carry that many SKUs (only 4,000 compared to Walmart's 150,000), the size of the warehouse space and the variety of product can be overwhelming. During any trip I make to Costco, I always take a look at some of the packaging and displays and note what grabs my attention and others that are just so-so.  Since Costco is self serve, displays are the silent sales person. In addition, if there are only 2-3 brands in a category the packaging and display must work harder to capture the consumer's attention and sell the product. The Good iHome: I was immediately drawn to this iHome packaging and display: The display invites you to take a closer look. The pallet wrap is colorful and tells the customer what the product is: A Rechargable Bluetooth Speaker with Speakerphone. The packaging has a hologram that changes color as you walk around the display which mimics how the product performs. The pallet holds a counter top type display that...