I was helping a friend understand some of the subtleties of prepping graphic design for print this afternoon, and had a momentary flashback to my teens. Just a fun reflection on how much the print industry has changed in the last two decades.
When I was a teenager in the late 1990s and working in advertising design and layout for several newspapers in the region, digital processing was just being introduced. There was a lot of push-back against it.
At the time I was one pushing harder for the tech shift, and often took matters into my own hands. I developed several software handlers for the (then new) Ultra Film Processors as well as plugins to import PDFs into the new Quark Xpress layout software we had started using. It was a very makeshift process, but it worked, and substantially reduced production time.
Within a few short years after I had shifted my career path onward to becoming a systems engineer for a hosting company, that new printing technology would be followed up by established digital-to-plate packaged solutions.
However, back then, 80% or more of the layout I did for press prep was still entirely by hand: write and design block content, print content to paper, cut paper to fit to layout spec, trim layout boarding, wax cutouts onto board, mount and photograph board, darkroom cartridge loading and tank fill/prep, chemical negative processing, light table registration for process, burn negatives to plate, wash the plate to set chemical reaction, and finally punch the plate for manual press drum mounting.
The printing industry and it’s technology is so different today that I feel sort of lucky, sort of like I was able to briefly experience the final days of a process that was generations old before it faded from common use. I was pretty much just a kid, and only worked in the industry for a few years, but I learned a lot from the folks who had been doing things that way for their whole careers.
I wish I had a photo of the old massive rotating wooden and glass process mount and box camera that was used to create negatives. I believe it was already around 100-years old back then.