Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

These have always been two more or less separate worlds: on one
hand, web content developers all eager to design their own unique new
interface (with catastrophic consequences for usability); on the other
hand, graphic designers whose suspicions in dealing with the Web and
its inherent graphic instability can best be understood in the context of
false claims by the software industry that its products could actually be
used to automate print-to-web publishing. Or, to quote a popular joke
among graphic designers: “the net was not developed by publishing
houses”.
Then in the late 2000s, in a remarkable turn of events, the rows of
icons and the clumsy animated mechanisms meant to (re)animate the
on-screen simulation of paper started to disappear, and the classic
paperback interface was resurrected in all its powerful historical simplicity.
The most striking example is Wikipedia, where each entry can
be formatted into a standard encyclopedia design, generating a single
printable PDF file. 182 There’s even an advanced option which makes it
possible to assemble, preview and print Wikipedia content in a classic
‘perfect bound’ book style, including automatically generated indexes,
tables of contents, etc. The resulting book can be purchased through
PediaPress. 183
This kind of simple, classic appearance can in fact be applied to almost
any web page by using an experimental (and free) browser ‘bookmarklet’
called Readability, developed by Arc90. 184 This tool not only
discards all advertisements and CSS (web page formatting) trimmings,
but effectively strips a web page of all content except its main text,
and “re-formats its layout, size, and margins, creating a newspaper or
novel-like page for easier text digestion.” A somewhat similar software
application, Readefine by Anirudh Sasikumar, 185 follows a more sophisticated
approach, applying a rigorous multi-column newspaper grid
layout (while preserving hyperlink functionality) to web pages, RSS
feeds, plain text and HTML files. Interestingly, this also happens to be
the general look-and-feel of most of the content recently produced for
e-book readers.
Taking the effort to combine
print and digital characteristics to
its ultimate material conclusion,
Traumgedanken (‘Thoughts on
Dreams’), an experimental design
book by Maria Fischer, 186 is a “collection
of literary, philosophical,
psychological and scientifical (sic)
Traumgedanken, book by Maria Fischer, 2010
texts which provide an insight into
94