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been a passionate supporter of all things
print. An educator and designer, Dejan is
Principal and Creative Director of Dejan
Associates. As a certified G7 Expert, Dejan
is an authority in both color and color
management—an avid student of color
perception and color theory as it relates to
branding and printed color reproduction.
In the spirit of what he does and what he
has seen print do, Dejan continues to be
an evangelist for how print engages the
senses.
“What we have had, really, is more than a
30-year battle on the whole ‘print is dead’
movement,” Dejan says. “Sometimes, the
media is the message. Digital is superb.
It is real time. It is global. But digital only
stimulates two of the four senses—sight
and sound. Print stimulates everything.”
In her book, “Haptics,” Lynette Jones
explains how haptics involves integrating
information from touch and kinesthesia
(sensors in the skin, muscles, tendons and
joints). The challenge, as Jones saw it, was
for technology to reproduce in a virtual
world some of the sensations associated
with physical interactions with the
environment.
The book is one that Dejan references
often, especially when he was the face of
the ETC (education-training-consulting)
Group at Sappi Fine Paper North America,
where he became an industry thought
leader on the power of print and paper.
“You have some people who see that, for
example, the magazine industry isn’t doing
well. From a manufacturing perspective, the
magazines are smaller; there are less pages
etc.. Yes, but right now, there are more
print titles out there. And if your audience
is only 1,500, that’s fine. Thanks to digital
printing, you can print 1,500 magazines.”
According to world renowned ink-onpaper
magazine expert, Samir Husni, there
were 122 new print-magazine launches in
2021, a sharp rebound from the 60 that
launched the year before. The director
of the Magazine Innovation Center at
the University of Mississippi, School of
Journalism, aka, Mr. Magazine, says that
the number offers hope that print media
has a strong— though admittedly more
boutique—future.
“I love magazines and catalogs and
product packaging,” Dejan says. “Who
doesn’t light up when they get their hands
on these things. I believe that the ‘print is
dead’ group has been practicing in mass
distraction. Print is alive and well. And it
continues to make a difference.”
September 2022