Due to the speed the weeks and months whip by when you are busy, the start of a new year offers a great opportunity to take a look back andconsider just what in the hell did occur during the last 12 months that you didn’t fully take stock of while you were on deadline. At this point, if you’rethinking; ‘Hold on Andy, the sea-going vessel has departed the jetty leaving you stranded atop the shore-based wooden protrusion’ you are bothcorrect and unnecessarily pedantic regarding the avoidance of a well known idiom. However, seeing that writing a new year blog in February is thesort of contrary action that a graphic designer should take (while looking like a hipster if possible) and that it takes me this long to write somethingthat isn’t clergy directed vitriol, I feel it justified...

Remembering the days of collecting files on to a zip disk (if you are under 25, ask your parents) and the hassle that entailed, I have for many yearsbeen a user of YouSendIt. A decent system for sending large files reliably that many of you are no doubt familiar with. Having been a paying customerof that service for around 4 years now, a helpful nudge from Dave introduced me to Dropbox and the necessity of my YouSendIt subscription is nowin danger. Late to the party as I usually am, I have always had a deep distrust of web based storage solutions and was surprised by it’s quality. ‘CloudComputing’ as a concept has been around for decades but now we all have the opportunity to store all our irreplaceable files in a vague networkether, not having to understand it particularly while remaining secure that it works and will one day lead to the self-awareness of Skynet with our owncontribution being that Terminators posses an innate knowledge of Indesign and can reliably remove red-eye from their own Christmas party photos.

The guy in charge of producing shiny brushed aluminium trinkets at Apple died but I’m not going back over that again. Instead, I thought it interestingthat it did prompt a PR push of sorts for Bill Gates intent on providing proof that his legacy is greater than that of Steve Jobs. Often seen to be Darthproportions evil, he now spends his time trying to end global disease presumably re-writing genetic code rather than computer code through the Billand Melinda Gates Foundation. So Bill was once evil trying to control the entire galaxy creating a behemoth monster in Windows that was capableof destroying the entire planet and that could be constantly destroyed by hackers throwing viruses down its many exhaust ports, hunting down smallbands of rebel coders and destroying their fledgling businesses with his mighty Microsoft Empire before, right at the end, he became good and triedto save the world/galaxy. As unfair as it might be, there are definitely some Sith like similarities there.

To bring things more directly back to design for a mere moment, I have decided to name my ‘most overused font of 2011’ as Copperplate and mymost hated as Serpentine. If the latter seems like an obscure choice, it’s because I had not really witnessed it’s use since around 2002 back whensome heathen at the agency I worked at used it on LITERALLY EVERYTHING HE EVER DID. The problem with it is it renders every word and lettertyped using it immediately abhorrent. Try it. You wont be able to type a word using it without wretching. In fact, the only thing that can be typed inSerpentine are the words ‘Lethal Weapon 4’ where the synergy between just how shit that font is and just how shit that film is, create a singularity thatrefuses to let your brain determine which horror is worse. Actually, I think it’s a Mel Gibson thing. I just tried typing ‘Mel Gibson is an anti-semite’ inSerpentine and that works too...

Finally, the insightful and not at all fictional Egon Spengler once said ‘Print is Dead’. This sentiment has since been echoed every year since Gozerwas destroyed in the 80’s. I’m sure it will be said again this year during 2012 so I’ll get in early(ish) to say ‘No. No it isn’t’. While I absolutely respectthe new and wonderous digital avenues open to the designer and am happy to embrace them, I still love producing design for print infinitely more. Itmay not be as immediate, the potential for disaster may be higher, it may be more expensive but it still retains the potential to be more impressive.This whole post hasn’t really been the 2011 retrospective that it was going to be because, really, only one thing truly matters. Print didn’t die.