How Print Design Can Future-Proof Your Freelance Career

Ian: Today I'm joined by Dave Hopkins, someone I know through his podcast — The Quickie Podcast — a design show that's well worth checking out. The title is deliberately provocative, but it's a genuinely great show. Dave is someone who is huge on print, and fascinatingly, over 150-plus episodes of Logo Geek, I've never done an episode on print design. So this is going to be a really interesting conversation. Dave, thank you so much for joining us.

Dave: It's my pleasure. You and I have known each other for a few years now, from when you did your episode on The Quickie. The show is purposely meant to have a provocative title, but the idea is quick storytelling conversations with designers — which never really end up being quick, if I'm being honest. We just get into stuff.

Ian: It's easy to talk about this stuff for hours on end. So let's dive in. Prior to hitting record, you started showing some exciting things that are happening in the print world. I'm someone who very rarely does print design — most of what I do is logo design and brand identity. When I do get into print, it's usually business cards, stationery, fairly simple things. It's something I want to get into more. And I think for other designers listening — especially in the logo design space — with the growth of AI, a lot of work is being swept up. More and more clients are creating things themselves with AI. So I think it's really important for designers to offer as much as they can, and print design is a great opportunity. Where should we start?

Why Print Design is More Relevant Than Ever

Dave: You've set the table perfectly. Let me just get the appetisers out first.

It's a really interesting time in design. If you think about it, there is more graphic design work being put out into the world now than ever before — because the tools have become so accessible to people. Yet almost none of the design going out in the world is actually remembered. It's so fleeting — Instagram scrolling, digital ads, things that people scroll past and don't think anything of.

The entire design landscape shifted when Canva came along, and all of a sudden design was accessible to administrative assistants and offices. And then AI came in, and all of a sudden the things you were told were "safe" — web design, social media design, motion design, logo design — all of that was the future. Print? "Print's dying," they said.

Well, AI has come in and in the span of 18 months has been directly attacking all of the things you were told was safe. The one thing AI is not going to be able to do is touch paper. AI can't touch paper. It doesn't know what paper feels like, doesn't know how to put papers together, what certain colours look like on certain stocks, what an emboss and deboss feels like, what a die cut can do.

Arguably, print is the most untouchable part of the design space right now — and I think it's going to remain that way for a long time.

On top of that, the rise of AI is creating an equal counter-movement away from screens. People are saying, "I used my digital tool to create something — now let me go touch grass." In that analogue world — real-world events, touch, running groups, concerts — print is a core part of all of those experiences. It's one of the only parts of the design world that lives in the physical world. The rest is on screens.

Ian: I love physical things. When I first started in design, I was doing brochures and leaflets for print companies, and one of the most exciting parts was always when the box of brochures arrived — picking it up, flicking through it. It was the same when I released my book — having a physical copy in my hand, even though I'd seen everything on screen, felt completely different. So as a designer, are you reliant on clients already wanting print before they come to you? Or are you actively selling it?

Dave: Full transparency — I don't call myself a graphic designer. I have designed things, but everyone I work with — business partners, clients, students — are all graphic designers. I've been in the print industry for over 22 years. I actually worked my way backwards through the print process: bindery and finishing, running presses, pre-press, plating, and somehow ended up in sales. For around 60% of that time I was working alongside graphic designers, helping them take a screen design and bring it to something they could hold in their hands.

As a business owner, where does print fit? Business owners are realising that if they exist solely online — only in emails and on Instagram — how do people know they're real? But when you print your work, showcase your customers' work, and connect in a tangible format — something they can hold — it psychologically connects on a much deeper level.

Here's a comparison: if you create a short video for Instagram, you have your audience's attention for maybe 90 seconds, best case. If you produce a small newspaper that has your brand throughout, your work featured, storytelling about you — even just an eight-page newspaper — they're going to sit down and be immersed in your brand for 15 to 30 minutes. You cannot buy that kind of digital attention. Print is how you create a moment for your customer where they are completely immersed in your brand, your story, your ethos.

The Business of Print Design: Pricing, Process and Revenue Streams

Ian: I want to go into the process side of things. With logo design I know exactly how long things take and how to price them. But with bigger print projects — newspapers, brochures — it feels much harder to manage from a business perspective. How do you approach that?

Dave: So just to add context: at Print Design Academy we're more of an implementation team — we coach and consult freelance design business owners on how to create a print-focused design business. We run small cohorts of around 20 students per month. So my answers are coming from what we actively coach.

You find it easy to price logo design because you've done it for a long time. Anyone adding a new service is going to have a figuring-out period. If you're going from purely digital to print, it'll naturally take longer at first. You'll send a file to a printer and quickly realise: I sent it in RGB with no bleed at the wrong trim size, or the image resolution is too low for print. There'll be a natural learning curve.

In terms of pricing, there's no right or wrong way — it's only wrong if it doesn't fit the business and life you want to build. You can price by time: if you know you can design roughly one page per hour on average, charge based on that. Or you can price by project: still do the maths internally, but give the client a single project price.

When you get more familiar with print, you can also make money on print project management — charging a fee for sourcing the printer, reviewing proofs, managing the process. And once you have a good relationship with a printer, they'll often give you a 10–20% discount, which you can then mark up. So you're getting paid for design, a management fee, and essentially a commission on the printing.

When you add print to your business as a service, it opens up multiple revenue streams you didn't have access to before.

Ian: I love that. The management fee especially — that's something I don't currently build in, but it makes complete sense.

Dave: Exactly. There are print providers who exclusively deal with resellers — and as a designer marking up print, you are a reseller. I know clients who've done signage for municipalities and big events, printing a hundred signs, and marking up each sign by $25–$50. That's $2,500–$5,000 just from placing the print order and billing the client for the whole thing.

Managing Content and Client Deadlines in Print Projects

Ian: Content is always a concern, especially on bigger projects like newspapers and brochures. Is there an ideal process for sourcing content from clients?

Dave: Dude, that is a tale as old as time. "When will my client send me the assets?" And the answer is generally two days before they want the finished thing.

The process is broadly the same as a web design project — but with print, when you finally get everything, you can't just hit publish. You still have a minimum of a few days, often a week or two, before the printed piece is in someone's hands. So you actually have a bit more leverage to say: "I need all of this by this date, because there are real production steps — design, print, shipping, distribution — that have to happen."

For brand new clients, be rigid. Make clear: if I don't have the assets by this date, your deadline will not be met. It usually only takes one missed deadline on their end for them to course-correct.

Ian: That's the key — having a process and using it as leverage. In my logo design contracts, I have a clause stating that if feedback isn't received within 30 days of presentation, the project gets archived and there's a re-activation fee. I've rarely had to enforce it, but just having it there changes client behaviour. You can apply the same principle to print. Process is everything.

Understanding the Print Process: From Concept to Finished Piece

Ian: Can you talk through the approach of working backwards from the finished print piece?

Dave: Definitely. The starting point is: what feeling do I want somebody to have when they're holding this thing? How do I make them feel that this is special — something they don't want to throw away?

When you understand the user experience of a print piece — how it's going to tell the story as someone turns the pages — you can start making decisions. Which paper stock? Is there an emboss on the cover? A spot UV? You piece it together from the end point backwards.

We also teach newer designers to learn print from two directions. The first is visiting a print shop, getting a tour, and seeing how things go from a blank sheet to ink on paper, cut, folded, and finished. The second — and equally valuable — is reverse-engineering things you pick up in the world. When you come across packaging or a book that feels really cool, ask yourself: how was this made? CMYK? Spot colours? Saddle stitch? What weight paper? You start to be able to assemble in reverse how you got to that finished result.

When you can pick up a box and say, "24-point board, CMYK plus two spot colours, foil stamping on the cover" — that's when you really understand print.

Ian: That's interesting — I've taken for granted that my career started on that side. I used to work for an exhibition company as a print finisher, manufacturing pop-up display stands from scratch. And early in my graphic design career, I got to visit a print facility and see the massive presses in action — the plates, the Pantone ink mixing, the layers of CMYK being laid down one at a time. If you haven't had that experience, it's absolutely worth visiting your local print company and asking for a tour.

Dave: Yes! Every year I go into our local design school, bring a cart full of paper swatch books, and then we all go on a print shop tour where the students' own designed poster gets printed on press. They walk away with their work printed on coated and uncoated paper so they can see the difference. They're sucked in the whole time. They walk out hooked on print.

Types of Printing: Offset, Digital, and Everything In Between

Ian: Can you talk through the different types of printing and how the technology has changed?

Dave: Great question. At the very top end, if you're doing millions of impressions — think the IKEA catalogue — you're in gravure printing. That uses metal cylinders with images etched in, built for enormous print runs. Very high setup cost, but incredibly consistent at huge scale.

Then you have offset printing, which is one of the most widely used technologies today. Here's how it works: a printing press has a tower for each ink — cyan, magenta, yellow, black. Each ink gets applied to a metal plate that's been burned with that colour's separation. The plate gets inked up, transfers the image to a rubber blanket, and the blanket presses it onto the sheet. Layer by layer, you build a full-colour print. Offset comes in two forms: web press (a continuous roll — think newspaper or magazine scale) and sheet-fed (individual sheets fed through at high speed).

With offset, setup costs are significant — you're making plates, using material for makeready — so it only makes sense for larger print runs.

Then you have digital printing, and this is where things get exciting for designers. Commercial digital printing — especially high-end machines like the HP Indigo — produces offset-like quality without plates, at very low minimums, at an approachable cost.

And digital has expanded massively. You can now:

• Foil digitally
• Spot gloss raised UV digitally
• Print multicolour holographic effects digitally
• Print directly onto aluminium cans digitally

There's almost nothing you can't do digitally anymore.

Ian: Wait — printing on cans? That's wild. I had no idea that was possible.

Digital Can Printing and the New Frontier of Print

Dave: Yes! I'm holding one right now. It's shiny, it's got texture, gold, vibrant colours. And it was a short-run digital print. The company that does this is HART Printing (H-A-R-T). As a graphic designer, you can go to their website, download a can design template, do your design, and request three sample test prints for around $50. Same can, or three completely different designs — printed, boxed, and shipped to you.

The can I'm holding has a robot on it — there are eight different versions with different heads and bodies, so people can mix and match on the shelf and create different characters. People have even ordered digital cans for weddings — a custom beverage with every guest's name printed directly on their individual can.

Ian: That's incredible. I recently worked with a client on a whiskey and cola brand — I did the logo and packaging direction — and I had no idea I could have offered actual can design and sample prints as part of that service. My client probably didn't know that was possible either.

Dave: That's exactly the opportunity. And the same accessibility exists for newspapers. Through Newspaper Club, you can get ten fully custom-designed, folded newspapers shipped to you for around £50. They do zine-style booklets too.

How to Win New Clients With Print: The Ink Over Algorithm Method

Dave: This brings me to something we teach called the Ink Over Algorithm Method. As a logo designer, it's great to send a PDF portfolio to someone — but I'd bet a lot of those get buried in inboxes and don't get responses.

If you made a newspaper featuring a story about you, your work, your ethos — and sent it to people you want to do business with — they are going to look at it. It lands on their desk. It doesn't get buried in any inbox. They can't help but spend time with it.

We run monthly workshops where we walk designers through this process. By the end, they have a 90-day action plan: which clients they're going to approach, what print piece they'll design, which projects they'll feature, when they'll send it, and the follow-up steps.

Not only do businesses benefit from creating print — designers can win new clients more easily than ever by sending something printed, instead of trying to get noticed in the Instagram algorithm.

Ian: I have a designer friend, Ben Loiz, who sends out an annual newspaper-style piece to everyone he knows. And it's genuinely exciting to receive it. It makes me remember him. It elevates him above so many other designers in my mind — he's not buried in my inbox or lost on Behance. His thing is sitting on my desk. And because it's beautifully made, I keep them. I've got them all in a little box of special things.

Dave: And it works for existing clients too. One of our students, Jason Craig (@jasonthe29th on Instagram), spent around $1,500–$2,000 producing a 52-page perfect-bound book showcasing his illustration, logo, and mural work. He didn't send it to new clients — he sent it to existing ones. From that single print piece, he landed a $30,000 mural project from a client who had it sitting on their desk, waiting for the right project to give him.

Producing print and sending it to current clients, reaching out to new clients with it — you stand out like crazy.

Staying Up to Date With Print Design Developments

Ian: How do you keep up with what's possible in print? I didn't know about the cans until you told me just now.

Dave: I'm really connected with the industry — and honestly it's less about trends and more about developments in accessibility. Things that were impossible or extremely expensive before are becoming possible and approachable on smaller and smaller budgets.

At Print Design Academy, we're connected to equipment manufacturers and we're part of print industry newsletters and publications. A lot of what we do is translate — print equipment manufacturers don't speak in a way that designers even want to listen to. We take a press release about a new technology and translate it into: "here's why graphic designers should be excited about this."

Every March, we also run our Print Design Summit — a five-day free virtual conference. We've just had our fourth, with the fifth coming in March 2027. Around 4,000 graphic designers attend each year.

For designers who want to stay informed on their own, I'd suggest getting onto the mailing lists of paper manufacturers. In the UK, GF Smith is a big one. Others worth looking at include Mohawk Paper, Neenah Paper, and Fedrigoni. Also check out Foil Co for foiling options. Get on their email lists and you'll be on the front lines of new product updates and technologies.

Ian: A lot of companies also send out free sample packs, which are always great to receive and explore.

Dave: Yes! And building a collection of swatch books is incredibly important. Imagine being on a call with a client, trying to describe a paper that feels slightly rough — you just can't. But if you can get that swatch book in front of them and they feel it and say "yes, that," it does the selling for you. Every new student in our coaching cohort gets a box of swatch books from different manufacturers just for joining, because you have to have these tools if you're going to do print design.

How to Learn Print Design: From Free Resources to Coaching

Ian: What's the best way to actually learn print design?

Dave: There are a few stages, depending on how much time or money you want to invest.

Free options (invest time):

• Print Design Summit — Five days, free, runs every March. Talks, case studies, industry experts, live community chat.
• Print Design Academy on YouTube — Higher-level content on paper, business, and making files print-ready.
• Free print resources on the website — including a print-ready files checklist, and a guide to pricing graphic design featuring interviews with six design business owners earning from $150K to $2.5M per year, with a print-specific section on making extra money from print.

Paid option (invest money):

• Print Design Academy Coaching Programme — 20 students per month, application-based, implementation-focused. Faster results for those who are serious about building a print-focused design business.

Final Thoughts

Ian: I feel genuinely excited about print after this conversation. I want to start designing some of those cans! I think for identity designers especially, print is a real opportunity — with logo design, you constantly need a flow of new clients. With print design, you can have ten long-term clients and keep creating things for them across multiple touchpoints. And as AI continues to impact the volume of identity design work coming in, print feels like a meaningful and exciting way to expand what you offer.

Dave: That's exactly it. My whole mission was to inspire designers to see what's possible and how much more accessible print is than they think. Once you see it, taste it, smell it — you're in.