The year of small print runs

Print did not die this year. It got smaller. More considered. More frequent.

The big runs that used to be the default for small studios, three thousand business cards, five thousand postcards for a launch, are largely gone. In their place: runs of fifty. Runs of a hundred. Things that arrive in the post for one client at a time, designed for the single hand that will receive them.

A few notes on what has worked.

MOO for runs under two hundred. The quality is fine for most uses. The turnaround is fast. The minimum order is one. There are nicer printers, but for most small-studio purposes the trade-off does not pay.

Newspaper Club for anything over twenty pages where a magazine feels right. The minimum is one copy. The output is genuinely good for the price.

Mixam for everything between a card and a magazine, which turns out to be most of the printed work small studios actually need.

Hatch Show Print and the various letterpress shops, for projects where the budget allows it and the timeline is generous. There is a particular kind of work that wants letterpress and another particular kind of work that does not. Knowing the difference is most of the trick.

The small printed thing that goes out at the end of a digital project is the gesture I keep returning to. A thank-you card with the new wordmark on it. A printed colour palette. A folded letter, hand-signed, sent in a brown envelope. Production cost is in pounds, not tens of pounds. The effect, on the relationship and on the work that follows, is out of all proportion to the cost.

This is going to keep being the shape of print work for small studios, I think, for at least another year. The big-run economy was supported by a particular kind of in-person business, conferences, retail buying, mass mailing campaigns, that has not come back at the rate the post-pandemic press keeps predicting. The small-run economy was always there. It just got more visible because it was the only thing left.