Print Buying Direct

Pre-press – 20 years of change – part 2 – 20th March 2009

A history of transitions

Pre-press’s history over the last 20 years has been a history of transitions and change, mostly the result of digital innovations and social development. Cast your mind back to 1989. It was a year of political revolution, starting in Poland and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. Rain Man won Best Picture at the Oscars, NATO turned 40, and Tiananmen Square protest and protesters were brutally quashed. France celebrated 200 years since its revolution, and Linotype acquired Hell from Siemens. The print industry was sort of leading the way in the media business: Batman was release in 1989 to become the highest grossing film based on a comic, a record that remained until the Dark Lord was released this year.

In 1989, the font wars that had been raging since the introduction of the Apple Laserwriter in 1985 were finally resolved. Bill gates of Microsoft and John Sculley of Apple announced an agreement to share outline font technology and printer software. Microsoft acquired the rights to Apples font technology and Apple the Microsoft output drives. Fonts could now be endlessly manipulated and we could use type in every kind of digital document or software application. This delivered a massive wallop to Adobe, which had been hanging on tight to it proprietary font technology and its lucrative licensing deals. Within moments of the Apple and Microsoft announcement, a tearful John Warnock, cofounder of Adobe, conceded: the company would open up its outline font specification for Adobe Type 1 Fonts. This led ultimately to the use of digital type in every class of digital application, from print and far beyond.

Such was the drama of this announcement that everything else that year rather faded into insignificance. However, a new company EFI, founded by Efi Arazi who had also founded Scitex, introduced its first product, a colour data compression scheme for high speed on the fly data compression. This was a major step towards widespread colour use, at a time when colour was the preserve of highly specialised repro magicians. Still a new generation colour systems for artists and designers based on Sun workstations, with low cost scanners or links to high end colour systems was introduced that year. They had been available for several years, but MACS and PCs were still not taken seriously as professional computing devices for graphics applications, and especially not for colour work. Sun and DEC workstations and proprietary hardware were still the order of the day for all areas of pre-press, and the fastest RIPs took more than 40 minutes to image a line art file at 2400 dpi.

But MAC and PC based arrivistes started to come on the scene, particularly as PostScript’s spread continued, through the efforts of Adobe and assorted PostScript clone developers including Harlequin. Hints of coming shift were evident in the consolidation of the dedicated composition systems market and the preference of increasing numbers of developers for providing links to desktop publishing systems from their proprietary technologies. Albeit reluctantly, the move to off the shelf hardware was starting, with systems such as the Crosfield 9500 page make up station running under the Unix operating system.

To be continued…

See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5 of our blogs on Direct Mail and Transactional Print

Print Buying Direct is one of the Uk’s leading suppliers of graphic design and print, based in the Crewe and Nantwich area of Cheshire (UK) but supplying all of the UK & Ireland. See our websites for more information on graphic design, brochures, business cards, appointment cards, leaflets, flyers, pamphlets, posters etc

Print Buying Direct is a trading name of The Printing House Ltd. This brand was originally set up to protect the quality name of The Printing House of Crewe and Nantwich, Cheshire, Uk – recognised throught the North of England as a quality printers. Now Print Buying Direct has established itself over the last two years and has become a quality brand in its own right with very competitive prices nationally. Take a look at both websites and learn more about us.

Please feel free to browse our print buying website and use it as a useful tool – we are adding new pages and offers every week. So keep popping back, subscribe to our printing blog, email info@printbuyingdirect.co.uk or call call 0870 950 8444.

For more information please see our websites – especially our Printing Glossary – Printing A to Z – this makes a really useful guide for designers, printers, print buyers, college students etc.

Don’t forget The Printing House also specialise in Printing for Schools, especially School Prospectus, Secondary School Prospectus, College Prospectus, Primary School Prospectus & Sixth Form Prospectus. We have a vast range of experience design and print of primary, secondary, 6th form, college and universtity prospectus. Visit our School Prospectus Made Easy website to see examples of our work and more about our products. Our customer testimonials webpage is constantly being added to – please stop by and see our reviews.

Transactional and Direct Mail – Part 5 – 19th March 2009

Keeping secure
As clever as the print technology has become, so too have a whole plethora of other features about transactional documents, such as anti-counterfeiting measures including holograms, security papers, and markings. The ability to garner more from the documents you send, through features more readily familiar to those who produce packaging applications, will also find a place in the transactional world, with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags or upcoding that will, in the future, open up a whole new information gathering source for both corporates their customers.

As high security versions of transpromo applications become the norm, a range of overt and covert security features can be added to paper at the manufacturing stage, which will provide an assurance that documents are genuine. Simple applications such as watermarking, right the way through to fibres that fluoresce under certain lights/temperature and on into printing holograms with lenticular applications will be offered as part of the printing package.

Transactional documents will continue to come through our letterboxes for some years yet. They will continue to come on an all too regular basis. Financial institutions, utilities, travel companies, and supermarkets have budgeted and planned for these documents and will send them out anyway. What better way to exploit digital print technology, whilst helping the environment, than to add promotional messages to the white space of those transactional documents?

See Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3

Print Buying Direct is one of the Uk’s leading suppliers of graphic design and print, based in the Crewe and Nantwich area of Cheshire (UK) but supplying all of the UK & Ireland. See our websites for more information on graphic design, brochures, business cards, appointment cards, leaflets, flyers, pamphlets, posters etc

Print Buying Direct is a trading name of The Printing House Ltd. This brand was originally set up to protect the quality name of The Printing House of Crewe and Nantwich, Cheshire, Uk – recognised throught the North of England as a quality printers. Now Print Buying Direct has established itself over the last two years and has become a quality brand in its own right with very competitive prices nationally. Take a look at both websites and learn more about us.

Please feel free to browse our print buying website and use it as a useful tool – we are adding new pages and offers every week. So keep popping back, subscribe to our printing blog, email info@printbuyingdirect.co.uk or call call 0870 950 8444.

For more information please see our websites – especially our Printing Glossary – Printing A to Z – this makes a really useful guide for designers, printers, print buyers, college students etc.

Don’t forget The Printing House also specialise in Printing for Schools, especially School Prospectus, Secondary School Prospectus, College Prospectus, Primary School Prospectus & Sixth Form Prospectus. We have a vast range of experience design and print of primary, secondary, 6th form, college and universtity prospectus. Visit our School Prospectus Made Easy website to see examples of our work and more about our products. Our customer testimonials webpage is constantly being added to – please stop by and see our reviews.