[rafaelmn]

How relevant is print these days ? Coming from that background it's depressing to see my former coworkers working in a shrinking market, and the only people in graphics I know that are making reasonable money are in digital.

Not to say that it's irrelevant just that at this point it feels like it kind of missed the boat in this space.

[martin_a]

> How relevant is print these days?

Still quite relevant, especially in some areas. Think about packaging and labeling, there's just not really a way around print in these areas.

Besides that, digital print is the future. Print also needs to become clever and data-driven, more personalized and tailored to the recipient, but that's hard work.

Example: Just last week I received a catalogue with the fall/winter collection of a larger clothing brand. I threw it away immediately. Lots of things in it that are not my size, or my style or whatnot. A personalized product would have helped. Pick articles similar to those I own (you got this data from my previous orders), only show articles that are available in XXL or larger (look at the sizes I kept and did not return) and that's it. "Hey Martin, these are _your_ pieces for the winter season, enjoy!" Maybe it's only 16 pages then instead of 50+ but it would have been a much better experience for me. Also cheaper to print and ship for the store but with a much higher value. But yeah, programmatic printing is hard(er) to do then order 100k catalogues from the cheapest shop you'll find.

[kookamamie]

I don't think anyone working in print would use Gimp, though?

[pessimizer]

The reason they didn't use GIMP is because they couldn't use GIMP. It simply didn't have necessary capability. When I was working in prepress, I would have done anything to use GIMP. That desperation to escape Photoshop is why Affinity took off.

If Inkscape could get a UI for precision positioning, something you could e.g. design an entry form in; and Scribus could polish up, I think a lot of people would move to a FOSS workflow.

[martin_a]

Naaah... For better or worse we're all set up with our Adobe Creative Clouds...

[glimshe]

The Affinity suite - now for $80 due to Black Friday - is a viable competitor to Photoshop for many applications. It's much better than Gimp.

[martin_a]

That's true, I got one myself, but as everybody is educated and trained on Adobe products switching is not that easy.

[em-bee]

why is that though? isn't that the bulk of the criticism? bad UX and lack of features needed for print?

[kookamamie]

I guess - of course it's a chicken-egg sort of a problem. No one's going to use it for print, before it has print-related capabilities - the same can be said for much of the UX, in general.