The experience of good print media is a complicated one. In your hand, a piece of well managed printed marketing excites various senses simultaneously. Surprisingly, surveys from various printing bodies suggest content isn’t necessarily king, rather the icing on the cake. How it feels comes up top! Thats not to say we should abandon content, but rather consider the greater picture.
So lets take a minute out to examine the sense of touch and how can we tap into this rich seam of human behaviour and create higher levels of interaction. Is it possible to produce a print campaign that creates an experience solely with ‘the material at hand’? Or can we only consider a mix of both visual and kinaesthetic themes.
The print industry under threat from the wider media landscape had been slow to publicise kinaesthetic qualities of offline publications, but in recent years we have seen the printed product reborn, with exciting propositions within the paper and material supply chain, designed to tap into the human touch. Out has gone the traditional paper grades replaced with new fibre mixes and paper substitutes with subtleties in surface texture not seen previously. Just like any other sector in the media world, including music, the arts and the creative industries, print plays with fashions too. And it is to this end all providers of print campaigns must understand. The public at large today are much more sophisticated and aware than their predecessors were. It is just possible the right choice of print material will herald a greater return.
Below is a gallery of recent campaigns showing products which have undergone a transformation by switches onto alternative paper stocks