Print Connections Archive

  • Touch and Glow

    That a substance believed to be so beneficial could ultimately turn out to be the exact opposite is an old story that occurs time and again throughout history.

  • Bugged By Technology

    When Franz met Felice; or what you always wanted to know about Kafka, travel guides, and Parlographs

  • Jive Talkin’

    Jive from Caxton to Calloway; or Dictionaries, standard English and organic growth and change in language. OMG.

  • Pass the Bubbly

    Everything you wanted to know about Bubble Wrap Awareness Day

  • Of Fonts and Fears

    Helvetica, William Tell, Rossini, and paraskevidekatriaphobia

  • Because It’s There

    Decimal points, the Great Trigonometrical Survey, and Mount Everest

  • My Funny Valentine

    Five hundred years before Spotify — or the compact disc or even the vinyl record — songs were distributed on paper. That is, the lyrics to a song would be printed and distributed as “broadside ballads.”

  • 29 Days a-Leaping

    Great practical jokers; the picture postcard craze of 1908

  • Fan Club

    Emoji and the secret language of fans

  • The Sting

    Origami, entomology, and papermaking

  • Code Comfort

    Today, everyone talks about the importance of “multichannel marketing,” but as far as I know, in only one case has Morse code actually been one of those channels.

  • A Turkish Get-Up

    Secreting people inside machines is actually a not unknown ploy; conversely, the idea of making machines look and behave like people goes back millennia.

  • Christmas Wrapping

    The history of postcards and wrapping paper

  • Let’s Drink to Paper!

    Papermaking

  • When It Rains It Pours

    The first cellphone call ever made

  • A Serpentine Tale with a Photo Finish

    On snakes and color theory

  • Poll Position

    The role of new communications technologies in elections

  • Olympic Printing?

    Printmaking actually was, at one time, part of the Olympics.

  • Heavens to Betsy!

    Colors of the American flag

  • It’s About Time

    Time checking and Samuel Pepys's iWatch

  • A Whole New Ballgame

    Cracker Jack autostereoscopic imaging

Richard RomanoRichard Romano is currently Senior Analyst for WhatTheyThink.com, the leading news and information portal for the graphic arts industry, for which he curates the Wide Format topic page, and contributes other news and feature stories, as well as market research and technology reports. He also cohosts, with Dr. Joe Webb, WhatTheyThink’s monthly economics webinar. He also contributes to other industry publications, such as Wide Format & Signage, Printing News, Inkjet’s Age, the SGIA Journal, PrintPlanet.com, and more.

He is the author or co-author of more than a half dozen books, including This Point Forward: The New Start the Marketplace Demands, The Home Office That Works! Make Working at Home a Success — A Guide for Entrepreneurs and Telecommuters,“Does a Plumber Need a Web Site?” and Disrupting the Future. Many moons ago, Romano was the co-editor of The GATF Encyclopedia of Graphic Communications.

The Print Connections essays began as a series of blogposts for the now-defunct Digital Nirvana, and 21 of them have been collected into a book called Printing Links: History, Science, Technology and the Graphic Arts, available at the Museum of Printing.

He has vague recollections of having graduated from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications in 1989. He lives in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

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