I’ll admit it: I still think in print.
We all do, to some extent—the default document size in our digital world remains an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper. Open up Microsoft Word or a Google Document to see what I mean.
A few years ago, I realized that I was generating proposals and qualifications submissions in this standard ready-to-print size…that would never be printed.
It posed an absurd anachronism: creating documents in a format that was irrelevant—and even awkward! (Since then, I’ve started creating digital-only submissions in a tabloid-size format, but that’s a different story.)
But besides the document size, there are plenty of other anachronistic elements to these submissions.
Covers, for instance.
Covers, for a printed document, serve two purposes:
- They protect a book’s pages from wear-and-tear.
- They tell a reader what a book is about about without having to open it up.
Digital documents, obviously, don’t experience wear-and-tear from use.
As for the second purpose, there’s still some sense in telling the reader what a document is without having to fully “open” it up. I think of the preview panel in Files Explorer or the thumbnail that pops up when viewing the document as an icon.
So the front cover of a digital document serves some semblance of its original purpose.
But the back cover?
The back cover of a printed document has a purpose: if you place a printed book front cover down on a desk, the back cover still tells you what book it is. There’s no way to put a digital document “front cover down” anywhere…so why do we bother with a back cover?
One reason is that the back cover provides a simple signpost to the reader: You have reached the end. With a print document, you don’t need such a signpost—your being at the end of the document is a physical, tactile reality. (You’ll flip the last page, find yourself at the end, and no one will need to tell you.)
There’s no equivalent for digital documents, which can have hundreds or thousands of pages with no such self-evident indication of length.
So: a signpost. That’s useful, but it also seems to leave an opportunity on the table.
As it stands, my back covers are the page-size equivalent of a period. End of proposal, they say.
But I think they could say more. What if, instead of a mere period, they were an exclamation point? Or an ellipses?
Taylor Coe 