Hot Wax And Cold Type Revisited
The high fixed costs of Mergenthaler linotype, rotary presses and distribution systems were eliminated by cold type, and few regret the change. But the cold type systems have their own fixed costs that only get higher, which has surprised many in the publishing industry as it struggles for survival.
Production was the focus in the publishing industry’s early days, with increasing subscriptions and ad revenues more than offsetting the costs of incremental capacity. The design side was inexpensive, with the design creatives doing amazing things with hot wax, rubylith and lettering machines from a large vendor base.
Today, the costs have been inverted. Production is electronic with an incremental cost close to zero, while design has become far more expensive and specialized. Before, the creatives were hourly and usually trade journeymen, while today they are salaried and professional. A years worth of one computer workstation’s electricity can buy a lot of hot wax and rubylith. And the annual license fees and maintenance charges for the software can easily exceed the annual cost of mechanical maintenance and lead for the linotypes.
Many of today’s businesses, in effect, run their own publishing outlet, that being their web site which, ostensibly, is to support the business activity, ideally through facilitating sales and reducing overhead costs such as support. These businesses, whether they know it or not, have bought into the cost inversion that modern publishing has, with very little infrastructure support. Few can reasonably demonstrate a return on investment for their online efforts, particularly small businesses that lack the skill depth of their larger competitors.
In the hot type days, newspapers were produced daily and national magazines and journals weekly or monthly. They did this more or less flawlessly, because they had organized systems and workflows for what was essentially a physical production process. Today’s businesses that increasingly rely on their online presence would do well to adopt many of these old and proved techniques, particularly those related to the design side. Making the software simpler to use goes a long way towards displacing professional designers and letting line staff control their own activities directly.
© Copyright 2010 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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