Guest blog by Marcus Timson, FM Brooks and Founder of Pure Digital

For designers, creativity is all. Not money. Creativity.

The ability to express themselves freely, take risks and stretch boundaries is for many designers what attracted them to a life in design in the first place. But for creativity to be realised, then freedom to experiment and try new effects must ensue. Commercial design is accustomed to traditional production methods, where the focus is on high-quality long runs, with the result that freedom is not easy to provide.

Why? Because there is so much at stake with preparation costs and with huge stock inventories, the responsibility weighs heavily on a designer like a creative albatross, suppressing originality and a willingness to take even the smallest of risks. Traditional print processes often require long lead time, as well as the higher cost of make-ready and origination, which makes it harder to test or redesign products at short notice.

That’s not to say that traditional print processes don’t have their place or add value. Recent developments in hybrid systems for production flexibility accommodate the modern marketing landscape too. However, digital still affords a higher level of flexibility for short runs and customisation that can have great advantages for the design process.

This may sound obvious, but when asked what the key motivator for a designer is in their work, it isn’t money. It’s the freedom to be creative. Period.

So what?

In a different way to traditional printing processes such as offset litho or flexo, digital printing offers a designer additional freedom to experiment. For testing new ideas or techniques, digital printing is ideal as the cost to produce a small run is minimised. With no pre-production, designers can get their ideas transformed into a physical reality within hours rather than weeks and updating designs for a special run or making refinements is easy. But this is not a commonly known fact among many practitioners of commercial design. Our research found that there is no focus on digital printing for designers of interior décor and other mainstream applications. No forum, no content path, no best practice, no reference point and no community.

Until the launch of Pure Digital. We launched Pure Digital as a forum that provides designers with insight and innovation, so they can free themselves from analogue’s limitations and become truly experimental and creative in their work.

Want to learn more about Pure Digital? Visit the website here. The event takes place 17th – 19th April at the Rai, Amsterdam.

Want to learn how Bespoke works with FM Brooks? Contact us now.