Lisa Sarote Professor Patrick Henry GA 110, Section 2401 November 16, 2002 Tools of the Trade: Advances in Typography and Page Design As the philosopher Heraclitus said, "Nothing endures but change." Such can be said for the printing industry, which has seen many innovations come and go throughout the centuries. Because of these changes, it seems that the control of the industry has gone full circle. In the beginning, anyone who could pick up a stick and draw something on a wall could communicate an idea. As printing became more sophisticated during the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, it evolved into a craft and then a specialized process practiced by skilled artisans and printers. Today, computers, software and digital equipment allow almost anyone to create publications in their own homes and offices. Without a doubt, the technological advances in typography and page design have done a great deal to bring these changes about. Ancient Times Capturing words and ideas was first achieved by hand. Prehistoric people drew pictures on walls in a seemingly haphazard fashion. The Egyptians and the Phoenicians refined these pictures into meaningful symbols and devised ways to organize them to communicate their ideas. It was the Chinese, though, that made the first steps towards printing as we know it today with their invention of paper in 105 A.D., printing (2nd¯3rd century A.D.) and moveable type in 1045 A.D. As our language and alphabet developed over the years, the written word evolved into books. Crafting letters and symbols by hand and recording them to paper was a costly and time- consuming process; scribes labored months to produce just one book. Because the process was so time-consuming, few were produced and thus, were costly. For 400 years, skilled artisans recorded text and images onto paper this way. But the popularity and demand for books continued to grow. As noted in Philip B. Meggs' A History of Graphic Design, merchants developed print shops, employing craftsmen to produce lettering, decorative initialing, gold ornamentation, proofreading and binding to meet the overwhelming demand. The Renaissance In the mid 1400's, the emergence of typography, printing through the use of independent, movable, reusable bits of metal cast with type, allowed the economical and mass production of books. When Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing process appeared in Germany in 1440, the speed and quality of the text created made it possible to produce even more books. Gutenberg took individual metal type characters and assembled them into lines using a composing stick. The type was then placed onto a press where paper was forced against it to transfer the image. This process was the first mechanization of a skilled handicraft and was an early harbinger of the Industrial Revolution (Meggs 71). In order to design what the printed texts would look like, scribes and artists were employed to create exemplars, hand made layouts and manuscript texts (Meggs 72). These were early forms of page layouts as we know them today. The wealth of books available thanks to Gutenberg's innovations drastically reduced the cost of books, making them affordable to the middle and lower classes. The Industrial Revolution It was not until 1886 when the process of setting type in cases and designing a page on the press was radically changed with the introduction of the Linotype machine. This invention used a mechanical device to select moveable type templates, line them up in a case and pour hot lead into them to create a piece of metal type. This process sped up the printing process since it became simpler to prepare a page for printing. The Linotype machine did the work of seven or eight people casting type by hand. Skilled typesetters used it to design pages and place text. This invention further decreased the price of books and newspapers and created another surge in reading material available to the public. R.J. Brown notes in his article "A Capsule History of Typesetting", in 1913, a new development in line composition called the Teletypewriter appeared. This machine was attached directly to a Linotype to control composition by means of a perforated tape. The tape was punched on a separate keyboard unit and a tape-reader translated the punched code into electrical signals that could be sent by wire to tape-punching units in many cities simultaneously. These duplicate tapes were used to operate line-casting machines like the Linotype. This machine allowed cities to share information in a timely fashion. It's probably one of the earliest examples of the "distribute and print" revolution of today, in which information is sent digitally to print shops in various locations, where it is then printed for the local community. The discovery of photography in the mid-1800s was not only revolutionary in and of itself, but to the printing industry as well; advances in typesetting were made possible because of it. In 1925, the photographic composing machine was introduced. Meggs describes it as a keyboard which produced a punched tape to control a long opaque master film with transparent letterforms. As a letter moved into position in front of a lens, it was exposed to photographic paper by a beam of light. After each character was projected, either the film carrier or the lens system moved so that character after character was projected and exposed side by side until the line was completed. According to Meggs, it was the Industrial Revolution that changed the printing industry from a craft to a service. Before this, a printer was involved in all aspects of publishing, from designing the typeface, deciding on the page layout to the actual printing of the publication. The factory system and the mechanization of the major processes broke up the handicraft into the separate prepress and press areas we know today. This distinction would become even clearer as we entered the 20th century. The Electronic Age In the early 1960s, the print industry stepped into the electronic age thanks to the invention of a group of machines that made use of a cathode ray tube (CRT) for photocomposition. The image of each character was created on the screen of a CRT similar to a television picture tube. This image was projected through a lens, where it formed a character of the appropriate size on light-sensitive paper or film. The keyboarding function was separate from the typesetting function and resulted in a punched paper tape or a magnetic tape containing the text matter and a series of codes describing the typeface and style, size, and all other instructions required for typesetting (Brown). Probably the most important advance to page design was the introduction of an advanced photocomposing method which was also based on the cathode ray tube. Adopted in the newspaper industry and still in use today, this system employed a video display terminal with a keyboard on which copy is typed. The composition appears on the tube and is also stored in a magnetic memory (Brown). This invention led to the word processing and desktop publishing systems we know today. The Desktop Publishing Revolution Up until the late 1960s and early 1970s, newspaper layouts were created with Linotype machines; operators cast hot metal type and arranged them into columns, producing about three lines of type a minute. Sonia Weiss describes how page layouts in magazines and other publications were accomplished until recently in her article "Desktop Publishing": At the time, most documents were prepared for printing using the "cut and paste" method. Text was inputted into machines called typesetters, which used laser or photo devices to create galleys--long, vertical strips of typeset sentences. The galleys were then cut apart and pasted onto pre-formatted layout boards, which also contained graphics or photos that were to be included in the document. When completed, these boards, called "camera-ready art," would be sent to a composing room and eventually become the plate used to print the actual product. These time-consuming, expensive processes were the models for the desktop publishing systems, which have obliterated the Linotype and "cut and paste" methods of the past. In the late 1970s, the Color Electronic Prepress System was an early version of the desktop publishing system, which tried to perform all the steps from the original copy to the plate in one system. Because these systems were device dependent and used proprietary software, they were very expensive to operate. Text was not editable in these systems either, so they proved to be more of a prototype for later technologies than a functional system. The Pocket Pal describes the birth of desktop publishing, which first became popular in the 1980s. These systems were device-independent, used off-the-shelf hardware and software, and personal computers. In 1982, the IBM personal computer was designed to run basic typesetting and pagination programs. In 1984, the Apple Macintosh was the first desktop computer that made typography an integral part of its operating system. In 1985, the Apple introduced the first desktop publishing system as we know it today ¯ with a laser printer, a page layout program and a typographic page description language. The software and the page description language standardized communication between the computer, the software and the output device. According to Sonia Weiss, the term desktop publishing is often attributed to Paul Brainerd, who in the early 1980s developed the PageMaker program for Aldus Corporation. PageMaker was designed for the newly released Apple Macintosh and featured a graphic user interface that allowed documents to be created and viewed on-screen as they would appear when printed. None of the advances in page layout software would have been possible without the concept of WYSIWYG ¯ "What you see is what you get." Editors and designers can see and edit their work in the exact format of their final product. Thanks to these desktop publishing systems, even an amateur can scan pictures into a computer, touch up the picture using Adobe Photoshop, place them into a layout along with text with Quark's QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign and insert graphic elements or illustrations created by Adobe Illustrator onto a page and create a publication. Only money can stop you from creating a simple printed product such as a flyer, newsletter or brochure. Although high-end equipment is needed to capture the quality of Cosmopolitan or The New York Times, the basic tools are the same. It's the output devices that make the difference. Today, a fully composed layout is sent to the printers, along with the fonts and images needed for the final product. Printers spend considerably less time on the layout than they did in the past, only checking that all the elements are in order before printing proofs for the customer. The client is ultimately responsible for the end product as far as content and layout. The printer is responsible for printing the job clearly with the correct colors and imposition. In that sense, the printer's role as a craftsperson who creates a layout pleasing to the reader's eye has disappeared. They are now technicians that maintain machines in near-perfect running condition and handle raw materials like paper and ink and ensure they are processed correctly through the machine to produce the final product. Lower-end publishing software such as Adobe PageMaker and PrintShop Deluxe allow the most inexperienced users to design and print their own newsletters, brochures, business cards, forms, greeting cards, among other items through the use of templates. These products have brought the printing industry to the masses to such an extent that they have hurt the business forms industry; individuals can print their own invoices, office forms and business cards. Fewer errors occur with the new desktop publishing systems as compared to the old methods, such as the Linotype machines, for instance; the text does not have to be rewritten so many times. Original text used to move from the typesetters who would key in the copy to the Linotype machines, set text line by line and then fit each line into a page form. Writers and editors must now carefully proof their work for errors themselves. They must also write to make sure their text will fit the allotted space in a layout (otherwise they need to add or delete as needed). Desktop publishing has also reduced the length of printing process further still, for both the pre-press and press stages. All the detailed set-up involved with a page layout is achieved with the click of a mouse and the tap of a keyboard with the emergence of the Apple Macintosh computers and page layout software. Since typography is more accessible to the public, the client is now more in control of what is published and what the end product will look like. Today, books, magazines and all types of reading materials come in an array of colors, styles and sizes. Printing today is in the hands of the clients, designers and writers. They create their vision with desktop publishing technology and send it electronically to the printer. Designers can create all sorts of images and artistic effects thanks to the advances in graphics software. The printer provides the service of printing out the job to the client's specifications and assisting the customer with their choices of paper and binding. Without the clients today, printers would be out of business. Bibliography Brown, R.J. "A Capsule History of Typesetting." The History Buff Page. <http://www.historybuff.com/library/reftype.html>. Browne, Malcolm W. "Paper Using Cold Type." The New York Times 3 July 1978. Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design ¯ Third Edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. Pocket Pal: A Graphic Arts Production Handbook. Memphis: International Paper Company, 2000. Weiss, Sonia. "Desktop Publishing." Jones Telecommunications and Multimedia Encyclopedia. <http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/desktop.html>. Winfrey, Carey. "How It Was, How It Is." The New York Times 3 July 1978: return to paper index