I started in print. Desktop publishing, then editorial layout for a travel magazine, then years of campaign and packaging work before any of it moved to a screen. I still think every digital designer who has spent serious time in print is better for it.
Print teaches the cost of being wrong
You cannot patch ten thousand copies. Once it is on the press, the decision is finished, and if the decision was bad it is bad in every copy, in public, for as long as the thing exists.
That changes how you decide. You check more carefully, you get more eyes on it, and you develop an instinct for which details will be expensive to get wrong. Digital forgives so readily that it is easy never to build that instinct at all.
Constraints make the work better
A fixed page, a fixed trim, a fixed number of inks. You cannot add another breakpoint, another state, another screen further down the flow. Everything has to fit and resolve here.
The infinite canvas is a trap. Given unlimited space, the path of least resistance is always to add — another section, another modal, another step — instead of making the thing you have work harder. Print does not offer that exit.
Craft you can only learn by touching
How a stock takes ink. What a coating does to a photograph. The way a fold changes reading order whether you planned it or not. How much heavier a typeface looks at 8pt on uncoated paper than it did on your screen.
None of that transfers by reading about it. You learn it by specifying something, seeing it come back wrong, and understanding why.
What carries across
Hierarchy, grid and rhythm — the fundamentals of putting information in an order someone can follow, which is most of what interface design is.
Typographic detail: the discipline of caring about spacing and weight at a level nobody consciously notices but everybody feels.
Restraint, and the habit of finishing. Print has a definite moment of done, and that expectation of a finished surface is a good one to bring to software.
What does not carry across
Print is a fixed artefact. Digital is a system with states, and a state you did not design is a state that will show up anyway, badly.
Print designers who struggle with digital usually struggle for one reason: they design a picture of a screen rather than a system that produces screens. The composition is beautiful and it falls apart the moment the content is longer than the mock-up.
I am not nostalgic about it. Print is not coming back as the primary medium and I do not think it should. But it remains the best training ground I know for the parts of this job that do not change: decide carefully, work within limits, finish properly.