At some point, the design had to leave the screen.
Printing is where political communication becomes physical. It is also where things get complicated in ways that no design software fully prepares you for. The survey sheets were printed in two different ways: through standard digital printing, which produces clean, colour-accurate, consistent output, and through risograph printing, which does not.
This difference was the entire point.
Risograph printing is a stencil-based duplicating process originally developed for high-volume office reproduction in the 1980s. It uses soy-based inks, prints one colour layer at a time and produces results that are characteristically soft, slightly textured and never entirely precise. Colours bleed at edges. Registration between layers shifts. Ink density varies across a page. The output is immediately, visibly imperfect in the specific ways that analogue printing processes tend to be imperfect.
As discussed in the previous post on analogue authenticity, these imperfections are not simply technical failures. They are communicative. The texture of a risograph print signals something about production, about process, about human and material involvement. It looks like someone made it rather than a machine optimising for uniformity.
The decision to produce both a digitally printed and a risograph-printed version of the same survey sheets was therefore not only practical. It was itself a test of the series’ central argument: that the medium shapes how political content is received, independent of the message itself. If participants respond differently to identical designs printed through different methods, that would confirm what McLuhan argued sixty years ago and what contemporary protest aesthetics continue to demonstrate.
The printing process, however, immediately revealed a limitation that needed to be acknowledged honestly.
Risograph printing works with a fixed set of available ink colours. These ink colours do not correspond directly to the full RGB or CMYK colour ranges used in digital design. A blue designed on screen will not print as that exact blue through risograph. A warm red may shift toward coral. Certain combinations of ink layers produce secondary colours that were not anticipated in the original design. The survey sheets printed through risograph would therefore not be colour-accurate reproductions of their digitally printed equivalents.
This was noticed during production and taken seriously as a methodological complication.
In an ideal research scenario, both printing methods would produce visually identical outputs, isolating medium and texture as the only variable. That is not what happened, and pretending otherwise would have undermined the integrity of the survey. Instead, the colour divergence became an acknowledged condition of the research process. Participants viewing the risograph versions would be responding to designs that were not only texturally different but also chromatically shifted from their digital counterparts.
This creates noise in the data. It makes clean comparisons more difficult. It means that participant responses to the risograph versions could reflect both the change in medium and the change in colour, and separating these two effects would be genuinely challenging.
But there is also something honest about this limitation.
Real analogue political communication does not exist in colour-controlled environments either. Protest posters are printed under time pressure with whatever ink is available. Wheat-paste adhesives yellow over time. Street light changes how colours read at night versus noon. The conditions of physical political communication are always imprecise, always subject to material unpredictability.
In that sense, the colour inconsistency between the two versions of the survey is not only a methodological problem.
It is also a reminder of what makes analogue political media different in the first place, and something to have an eye out for.
Sources:
- McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. McGraw-Hill.
- Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
- Heller, S. (2003). Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Phaidon.
