When It Comes to Print - The World is Not Flat

In 2005 in a landmark book, economist Thomas Friedman famously declared “The Word is Flat.” While not literally true (sorry flat-earthers) the phrase allegorically refers to the fact that the pace of globalization is quickly turning the world into one homogenous business marketplace where every country is on equal footing. As developing countries rush to catch up with the rest of the world and integrate with existing markets, the theory goes, all business practices will inevitably become equal and similar. In his book, Friedman theorizes that due to the equalizing forces of rapidly rising education, the internet, and far reaching global supply chains that one day a company in Nigeria will complete tasks in an almost identical way as a company in China, a company in Uzbekistan, or a company in California.

After an exciting 2018 of executing a myriad of global creative print work I can declare with no uncertainty that the world of print and color is definitely not flat. In fact, it’s not even close:

When recently running a robust schedule of European run of book ads in France, Ireland, Germany, and Portugal I encountered the usual complexities of European common sizes (A4, A5, A6, etc) and ensuring our creative teams were designing to that format. What I really had to prepare my team for, however, was the shift in color profiles to the European working space from North American color profiles. Although our existing color workflow was set up to construct build files in the North American GRACoL color profile and pull Epson proofs in GRACoL to ship to those publications to match, we quickly figured out that files need to be supplied to European partners in a FOGRA color profile. We ended up utilizing the FOGRA 39 color profile for these ads and proofs, as more recent iterations of FOGRA had been brightened due to paper’s increased reliance on brighteners, a stock that publications would not likely have.

For several recent conventions that were executed in Europe we wrestled with much higher than US drayage and logistics fees to transport exhibit materials from the advance warehouse to the show site. The lead time to clear customs in the EU when shipping materials from the US was also considerably longer than we anticipated, and we had to account for that when building the timeline for the tradeshow.

Asia has been unique all to itself. Aside from the printing being a patchwork of FOGRA and GRACoL color profile requirements, mostly on a country-by-country basis, the ACAP market shows a unique absence of major out of home vendors. In North America we’re so used to dealing with the major media players like JC Decaux, Clear Channel, and Freeman for our large displays, however for a recent convention in Asia where we executed several out of home placements we dealt directly with a variety of small and local vendors that owned those specific spaces.

The variance in color profiles and printing processes around the world isn’t necessarily a bad thing either; in fact it’s what makes working on global print campaigns so rewarding and fulfilling! Print is truly a global animal, but when executing global campaigns be prepared to dive in feet first and learn something new.