Print is one-way design. You look at stuff on a page and move on. Turn the page to see if anything interesting catches your eye. In print, everything stays anchored in its space.

The size of the columns in newspapers. The font size of headlines on the front page and inner pages. Magazines swore by consistency and only ads could do what they wished. Except that they had specifics to live by.

Full pages. Double spreads. Single columns. Over decades, it settled into a hum of commerce and circulation statistics. But the intervals were at least a month apart. If you mentioned ‘real time’ at a magazine in the 80s you would get strange looks. The same ones you get when you speak of column centimeters at a digital creative shop now.

Campaigns would take weeks, if not months to create. A game of slow tennis between the client and the agency. Physical designs went back and forth before approval. In an emergency, ads went out in a couple of weeks.

Briefing sessions were long and languorous. Product launches happened and they were stressful but not manic. Digital never sleeps. And the insomnia has spread to those who watch data streams like hawks.

There was no FOMO because there was little to miss out on. Now, we’re scrolling to kingdom come and going nowhere. Stuck in the click loop as if it indicates genuine interest. Far from it as click farms proliferate and mint money.

Interactions, like conversations are not single point reductions. Can you have one-word conversations? With teenagers, yes. But you can’t understand them.

This is what we’re trying to solve. You see how deep the problem is?

Let’s begin a long conversation.