Old School Design - Pre-computer

Here are a couple of images I found of typesetting from the past. One is of ladies setting type by hand and the other is a mechanical typesetting machine. It was quite a beast, but it sped up the setting process considerably. Also, I found a site on the web describing what graphic designer and typesetters had to do before computers were introduced into the work flow. Typesetting and Layout

Horizontal Stat Camera

Here it the mechanical drawing of the horizontal Stat camera. This unit was very large and required three of four times the amount of space than that of a vertical camera. As I said in class, the back portion of the unit was typically in a darkroom and the lights and copy plate were out in a lighted room. They both essentially did the same thing, just the horizontal had a larger reduction and enlargement capability.

Both units could produce either positive or negative, paper or film. With the advent of computers and Desktop Publishing, this type of equipment was rendered obsolete.

Vertical Stat Camera

Here is the mechanical drawing of the vertical Stat camera I was talking about on Friday. This unit was about chest high on me. Had to stand on a little box to view the image on the glass positioning plate. You would key in the amount of exposure and adjust for enlargement, reduction or same size. The original image/artwork was placed on the lower portion of the unit under it's own glass plate.

Sara Rudder's Sunglasses

Here is a student example of one of the Illustrator/vector exercises. To upload your Illustrator projects to your blog, you have to Export as a .jpg from Illustrator. Then open up the .jpg in Photoshop and convert the image from CMYK mode to RGB. The resolution is set when you export from Illustrator. When this is done, just click the picture icon in the blog posting text window to add the .jpg. Try it out. See if it works.

The Offset Printing Process

So finally, getting back to the process in design software and process. I'm going to talk about offset printing.

This will be the primary printing process you will be designing for when you are working professionally. 

The first picture is a one-color Heidelberg offset lithography press. This unit will print one color of the CMYK or spot color printing I have been talking about in class. 

The next is a four-color Heidelberg press. Essentially, four, one-color presses linked together. They can link as many print units together as needed. A six-color press could do the CMYK colors, a spot color and a varnish in 

one run. These things are massive. Have been know to eat small children if they get too close.

Both presses are called sheet-fed presses; where a stack of standard-sized sheets of paper are fed in the front of the unit and pulled into the press where the image is printed on the paper and deposited at the back of the press. 

Four-color printing can be done on a one-color press simply by taking the stack of papers back to the front of the press, wiping down the first color and re-inking the press with the next color and printing the new color. This is a labor intensive process to do on a one color press. So, to eliminate the labor, three additional print units are linked together and the colors are all printed in one run. 

Illustrator - Sunglasses

Rebuild this image of the sunglasses in Illustrator as a warmup to the "Favorite Ride" assignment. You need to open the image up in Photoshop first and save a .tif so you can import as a template in Illustrator to redraw the image using vector tools. Again, NO LIVE TRACE. Use the tools. You will be making a compound paths in this exercise. Make it look as close to the original raster image as possible.

Due next Wednesday.