The National Gallery: Printing on demand

Impressive understanding and exploitation of the web creates a new product.

The Site

The National Gallery has a highly developed website that complements the collection on show in London’s Trafalgar Square. Its online Shop includes a Create Your Own feature that gives visitors three options for customising printed products from the collection: Calendar, Greetings Card and Print on Demand.

For the first two, visitors choose from a themed but pre-determined selection of images and one of two formats, contemporary or traditional. Previews are provided to allow editing of the choices. Print on Demand throws open the choice to “virtually any work”, which can be tracked down and viewed in the Collection Index. Once a choice has been made, a button in the top right of index pages returns visitors to Create Your Own to complete their order.

The Takeaway

The National Gallery’s embrace of the internet to add a new dimension to its activities is impressive in its understanding and realisation of the possibilities this opens up. Create You Own is a fine example, exploiting the medium’s strengths of storability and searchability with a smooth command of usability and new technology in the shape of the digital printing system that turns it all into a previously unthinkable product.

Create Your Own is also worth studying not just as an exercise in ‘monetising’ a database, well though it does that. Utilising print-on-demand technology has significant potential for organisations that produce printed reports and brochures such as annual or environmental reviews. As well as allowing customisation of reports, digital print-on-demand promises significant cost savings over conventional printing – for example, no more under- or over-ordering or warehousing. And you could always turn your ads or photo archive into poster art.

First published on 20 December, 2005