A flat image has nothing to touch
Listen to the way people talk about images, it is worth all the theories. We almost never say an image is beautiful to look at; we say it is soft, it is dry, it is cold, it is rough, it is velvety. When a colour is wrong, we say it is hard. When a composition works, we sometimes say it is round.
None of these words belongs to sight. They are all words of the hand.
This is not a quirk of language, it is a clue about the way we receive an image. We do not merely see it, we assess it as a surface, and a surface that offers nothing to assess slides across the gaze without catching it.
THE WORDS
The funny thing is that the trades that make images have used this vocabulary forever, down to their technique. In papermaking, the hand of a paper is a precise term; it designates the ratio between its thickness and its weight, in other words how thick it is for what it weighs. A paper with a strong hand feels more generous at equal mass. Nobody thought it useful to invent a more abstract word; they took the name of the part of the body that would hold the sheet.
The rest of the lexicon follows. We speak of a paper's grain, of its touch, of a matt or gloss varnish, of a rich ink. These are workshop terms, not art critics' metaphors, and they come from the time when the trade consisted of handling materials before representing anything at all.
THE PAPER
Let us move on to what this changes concretely, because there is a fact I still find just as striking and that few people outside the trade know.
The same ink, printed from the same file, does not give the same colour depending on the paper. On coated paper, the surface is closed, the ink sits on top and the colour comes out vivid and dense. On uncoated paper, the ink penetrates the fibres, it spreads, it sinks, and the result is more matt, more muted, often darker. The phenomenon is systematic enough to be anticipated and compensated for when preparing the files.
So true is this that the reference swatch books exist in two versions, one for coated and one for uncoated, and the same colour reference is printed in them with two different renderings. The manufacturer has officially admitted that a colour does not exist independently of what it is laid on.
A colour is never alone. It is always a colour on something.
THE LIGHT
Then comes a whole side of the trade that works only through relief, and therefore only through light.
Embossing, debossing, spot varnish, hot foil stamping have almost no colour of their own. What they produce is a difference in height or gloss, invisible head-on and perfectly visible in raking light. An embossed cover is not read, it is discovered when you tilt the book. The object changes according to the angle at which you hold it.
This detail seems far more important to me than it looks, because it describes a property that images had throughout their history and have just lost. A fresco, an engraving, a print, a poster glued to a wall — all these objects reflected the light of the room and changed with it. A screen produces its own light, it is perfectly flat, and it gives exactly the same thing wherever you look at it from.
It is probably the first time we are looking at images that have no surface.
THE PENDULUM
Which explains a phenomenon I find fascinating: the industry spends its time removing material and then putting it back, and it starts over every ten years.
The interfaces of the two thousands imitated leather, felt, brushed metal, with a heaviness that ended up becoming awkward. The great shift to flat, in the mid two thousand tens, swept everything away at once: no more shadows, no more relief, no more textures. And it did not take long for the shadows to come back, then the blurs, then the glass effects, then the grain and the paper backgrounds you see everywhere today.
The back and forth is even clearer in computer-generated imagery, where the question was settled technically. Modern render engines describe a surface first by its roughness, that is, by the way it scatters light, before even speaking of its colour. What makes an object credible is not its hue, it is the behaviour of its surface. Realism is a problem of material, not of colour.
So the pendulum swings, we remove, we put back, we find it too busy, we find it too cold, and there is no stable middle ground in there. What remains constant, however, is that every return to total flatness ends up producing the same complaint: something is missing.
THE PRICE
It must still be said why flat wins so often, because these are not reasons of taste.
Material costs. An embossing is paid for, a fine paper is paid for, a spot varnish adds a machine pass and therefore a delay. On screen, a texture weighs in file size, a soft shadow has to be computed, a glass effect drains the battery of older devices. Flat is faster, lighter, more reproducible and easier to roll out across forty formats.
These are good arguments, and I am not trying to contradict them. I am simply noting where they lead when they win all the time: to images that pass before the eyes without leaving the slightest grip, forgotten before the end of the scroll.
A papermaking word borrowed from the hand, an ink that sinks into the fibres, a varnish that exists only in raking light, a roughness map that decides the realism of a render. It comes from four different trades and it says a single thing: an image becomes credible the moment it gives the impression of having a surface.
It is also, I think, why I cannot work for long on entirely smooth images. Not because they are ugly, they are not, but because there is nothing to grab hold of, and the gaze does what the hand does on a pane of glass: it slides, and moves on.
Material is not an effect laid on the image. It is what gives the gaze something to grasp.
To dig further. Any file-preparation guide for print, on the difference between coated and uncoated papers and on dot gain. The reference swatch books, which exist in two versions for the same colour. And the documentation of a physically based render engine, to see the place roughness holds there compared with colour.
