The Analog Renaissance, Episode 4: Print Holds Attention

Analog. Even the word itself makes me feel more grounded. With so much of our time spent online, I have found myself yearning for paper and ink and gardening and baking biscuits and thread and texture and all the things that really began my love for creativity in the first place. Years ago, I scribbled down a dream to create a magazine for surface designers. I tucked it away in my list of someday maybes as I have done many things. But slowly it just kind of kept bubbling to the top, becoming clearer, becoming louder, more urgent. The world of surface design is bursting at the seams with beauty and color and joy and purpose and legacy. And it deserves to be held in your hands. This was the introduction to my very first issue of Pattern magazine, a magazine I created from a love of tact joy. This is episode 4 of 9 of the Analog Renaissance, a series where I'm sharing the eight ways we're pressing into this analog moment as creatives and as entrepreneurs. Now, if you want the whole story and all of the data that backs this up, you'll want to listen to episode number one, called the Wake Up Call. Each episode focuses on one shift that we have made over the past 18 months. How we've applied it to our business, what the results have been, and how you can begin applying it to yours as well. The Analog Advantage Way number three is that print holds attention. This is one of the most fascinating stats I've heard in years. Print holds attention 50 times longer than its digital counterpart. People spend 20 plus minutes with print versus seconds with digital content. This is especially felt for me when I am just thinking about things like Instagram and attention spans and how we're fighting for three seconds. And it's exhausting. And it also has me thinking about my own user behavior. I have a couple of magazines and a couple of catalogs that when they arrive in the mail, oh my goodness, it almost takes my breath away. And I put them aside until I can have the moment. It's quiet. I've got something like a latte or tea with me and I can curl up and devour them. Okay, so 82% of consumers trust print ads when making purchase decisions over digital. Okay, that's really interesting. And print doesn't disappear after a click. It sits on coffee tables, on desks, on shelves, even when devices are put away. So in a world of infinite scrolling and seven second attention spans, print invites us to slow down. And so the question that that made us have is, when someone isn't on their screen, how will they think of us? How can we be present in their everyday life. So our first big experiment with this was print media. We made a magazine that big dream that I had just written down so many years before. What we created was a quarterly print magazine for surface pattern designers and creatives and artists and graphic designers called Pattern Magazine is now carried nationwide at all the Barnes and Noble stores. Yes, we pinch ourselves nearly every day. Well, this has really created almost immediate brand credibility and it's also created discoverability outside of our existing audience. We are hearing from people all the time who discovered us by walking by our print magazine in Barnes and Noble. And then it's a physical object that is made for a long shelf life. When we create Pattern Magazine, we don't think about it in terms of the quarter, we actually think about it in terms of years. So our mission is to create a lasting piece that has education and inspiration in it that you will want to, you know, doggy ear and underline and thumb through for months and months, if not years and years to come. We also make all of the spines a different pattern so that they will look lovely as they line up on your shelf. So each issue serves also as a top of funnel for some things in our own business. That means you can discover us with Pattern Magazine, but be invited to come join us in our membership called Pattern Plus. We sponsor our own magazine with our own ads, with our own offers, and of course, we work with outside advertisers and sponsors that, you know, align with this audience as well. But it lives where digital ads never can. In homes, in studios and in hands. I'll link Pattern Magazine in the show notes for you. You can go take a peek@bonniechristine.com patternmagazine if you want to see this analog goodness delivered to your doorstep, the spring issue is about to debut. We have three so far, so the spring issue is our fourth. Pattern is having a moment. From bold wallpaper to checkered mugs to stripey pajamas and floral notebooks, the world is embracing color and texture and personality again. We are officially living in the era of pattern drenching. And honestly, I'm so here for it. If you've been noticing it too, and thinking, I wonder if I could make patterns. You absolutely can. And the best way to do it is by using Adobe Illustrator. It's where I created my very first repeating pattern over a decade ago. And it's still the tool that I use and teach today because it's designed for this kind of creative work and it's trusted across the entire industry on a global basis. Illustrator makes designing seamless, repeating patterns feel intuitive. You can easily tweak colors, scale your artwork, and move things around without starting over. Everything stays crisp because it's all vector based. And when you're ready to put your pattern onto a real product, well, Illustrator works beautifully with printers, manufacturers and licensing partners. So whether you're creating patterns for your notebooks, your living room walls, or dreaming of turning your creativity into a career, Illustrator helps your ideas. Go from sketch to look at what I made, Head on over to our show notes, Open Adobe Illustrator and have some fun. Pattern is having a moment, and Illustrator is how you join it. Then we realized something else. If physical objects deepen connection to a brand, what would happen if they became part of the learning itself? This is where we reimagined and rewrote the entire student box experience for the 2026 Surface Design Design Immersion course. We have for several years sent a box experience to students. This workbook is unlike anything we've created before. In previous years, the workbook has followed the course lesson by lesson, page by page. Incredibly helpful, incredibly beautiful. But was it transformational? Not quite. So this year we intentionally broke that model. The 2026 workbook does not mirror the course line by line. Instead, it pulls the students deeper. It expands. It invites. It becomes the place where growth actually happens and is documented. This workbook is where inspiration gets gathered and taped in. It's where collections get mapped out visually. It's where patterns are planned and rearranged and refined. It's where ideas are sketched and crossed out and revisited. It's where big dreams are written down. It's where contacts are jotted down. It's where thoughts are glued down instead of floating away. Students are quite literally invited to document their entire creative process, and we imagine that it's something that will be such a special time in their life that they will always keep it so that they can think back on the growth that happened during this process. It's also so beautiful. It is bound in a gorgeous oatmeal colored linen. It's foil stamped in gold details with a gold medal spiral. It's 332 pages divided into six tabbed sections that align with the course. But the purpose is different. The course teaches and the workbook it holds inside. There are dot grids for mapping out collections and open space for taping in inspiration, and prompts that ask students to reflect and not rush pages that are designed for mess and iteration and discovery. This is where they will track their creative progress and their milestones. It's where they will heartstorm ideas instead of scrolling for them. It is where they'll see their patterns take shape across time. Not screens. The workbook becomes the evidence of their growth. Not a checklist or a transcript, but a record of becoming. And here's the magic of print. They linger, they flip back, and they notice patterns in their own thinking. Because attention slows down and depth begins to take over. This is about giving creativity a place to land. So when I think about how you might use this in your own business. When attention slows down, transformation speeds up. I'm going to say that again. When you can slow attention down, the transformation will speed up. Ideas that you can apply would be to do something like turn your best content into a printed guide or design and launch a one time or annual Zyn of some kind. Maybe you could create a student feature publication or offer a physical version of your best opt in. Or maybe you could send quarterly letters or postcards, or create catalogs or mailed offers. The questions that I'd have you kind of think through is what piece of your content deserves to live in physical form? What would someone linger with for 20 minutes instead of 20 seconds or 2? If print slows attention, where should inspiration come from in the first place? In the next episode, I'll show you how we stopped teaching students to find inspiration online and we started teaching them how to gather it in the real world and how you can apply this to your own business as well. Remember, my friends, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.