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Retro Gizmo: Artifacts from the Pre-Digital PrePress Department

 

Light Table, Prepress Department

Last year we featured a blogpost on an antique piece of bindery equipment still being used in our print shop. Today, we’re thinking about a few other vintage relics that have been gathering dust in the art department. The pre-digital days in prepress were not all that long ago – extending into the 1990s. The print industry was an early adopter of computer technology with digital imaging technologies, workflow and of course design software from the early days of Adobe, Quark, Corel, Aldus and others. Early Macs were the industry leader in digital typesetting, page layout and graphics. Both the design process and the photographic techniques used to image plates for offset printing underwent a rapid transition just before the new millennium.

The 90s saw the tail end of prepress imaging techniques that had evolved over decades.  Design skills included “paste-up” – manually positioning type and graphics onto each master sheet for printing. You’ll really appreciate a straight tool line once you paste on a piece of tool-line tape by hand! For graphic elements and photographs, anything other than 100% black had to be rasterized by imagesetters into “dots” to create grayscale halftones. Full color printing required four separate pieces of developed film, “stripped” into exact position with a hand-trimmed mask. Large print shops had many full-time employees whose job was to “strip” plates for the press, usually at light tables like the one seen at the top of this post. Below are some relics from those days when graphic design was as much craft as art:

Scale for enlargements
Resizing graphics and text was often done photographically before desktop publishing – requiring some math skills for percentages of enlargement or reduction. This handy tool was invaluable.
Pre-Digital Artroom Supplies
Paste-up: manually creating a master of the printed page. Red Litho Tape was used to block any light shining through a stripping sheet. “Cold Type” supplies included decorative tool lines in the form of tape. E-rulers were handy for measuring point size of imaged type.
Art Room Supplies
Strippers were small metal tabs used to keep film in perfect alignment for processing plates. It was also the name for the folks who handled that entire process. The orange sheet here is a stripping sheet, where printable areas would be opened up (masked) to allow photographic imaging of the press plates.
T-Square and grayscale or color targets
Manual skills and a steady hand were essential skills for paste-up. The T-square and other tools helped. Also, much of the imaging process relied on traditional photographic techniques to achieve proper color and grayscale output.

 

The skill and craft of fine printing and effective marketing is more alive today in the digital world than ever before. Strive to buy your print locally! A community printer will understand communication and design, with a special emphasis on your local market. They should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.
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Multichannel Marketing Powers Print and Digital Success

 

In a time of increasingly digital interaction, never underestimate the value of good, old fashioned tangible, physical marketing:  print, direct mail, promotional products, signage, embroidery/screenprinting. Perhaps because of the hype and excitement over the digital revolution in progress around us daily, we jump to a conclusion that print or more traditional communications are no longer effective. That is a marketing mistake.

Multichannel and/or cross channel marketing is truly a no-brainer. Why not utilize multiple channels in various strategies to reap the most benefits from your marketing budget? Along with your website, mobile apps and social media, configure a direct mail campaign and promotional product giveaway to drive home your message. Join virtual with the actual. Digital and Tangible.

Pig promotional product and direct mail campaign
In sponsoring a local River Race event, Carolina Mountains Credit Union branded their promotional product mascot and utilized a matching direct mail postcard to support their online marketing efforts.

Here are a few convincing facts on integrated marketing:

  • 45% of consumers over the age of 65 have no internet access in their homes. If seniors are in your target market, you must look beyond online contact.
  • 92% of millennials say direct mail – not email or online marketing – has the most influence when making store choices
  • the physicality of print, signage or promotional items impacts consumers in a way digital communication cannot replicate.
  • the response rate of direct mail is 10–30x that of email.
  • promotional products are often perceived as gifts, which they are, and tend to be held onto longer. The more useful or unique, the more they are valued and continue to represent your brand. Also as the world becomes more digital, the more a physical promotion stands out from the crowd.

 

ImageSmith is proud to be a printer in an exciting era of digital communication. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!
Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.

 

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OUCH! ANSI Safety Signage & Graphic Design Basics

 

Warning Sticker Hair Caught in Machine

Yes, I will keep the cover closed!

Not a very attractive image but it certainly makes me want to stop and consider how not to wind up in that position. The graphic design of workplace safety signage is built around the need to be instantly understandable, not subtle or creatively compelling. They want you to get your hand out of the way – NOW! – not necessarily admire the design of the warning itself. Good design in the safety sticker world is less about aesthetics and more about what speaks universally in a loud and direct way.

So we took a look around our shop: presses, cutters, folders, inserters, laminators… all with their own safety manuals and inherent accident risks. Finding a few warning signs was no problem. As the machinery is manufactured in various places both in the US and internationally, the signage varies somewhat although most follow the recognizable ANSI guidelines. ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, is a non-profit organization that oversees standards and guidelines in nearly every economic sector.  Their work helps ensure consumer safety, environmental protection, and promotes the US position in a global economy. Their standards for safety signage in the workplace were adopted by  OSHA (the Occupational Safety & Hazard Administration) in 2013. These ANSI Z535 safety sign standards strive to make all safety signage more instantly understandable by combining standardized headers with explanatory text and an increased use of pictograms.

Judging by the warning signs in our shop, hands seem to be in the most danger.

Warning stickers in the workplace

 

Workplace warning stickers

 

Workplace warning stickers

 

Workplace warning stickers

 

Know Your Objective

Safety signage is graphic design at it’s most elemental: get instantly noticed, understood and influence behavior. Pain and the avoidance of bodily harm are generally easy selling points, so ANSI signage relies on the basics of color coding, bold typography and straightforward text. When evaluating more complex, sophisticated design projects, discerning the objective and the most straightforward means to relay that can often be a good starting point to both begin the design and later to evaluate it’s effectiveness.

Of course, there’s always that one that could use a little more work:

Warning sticker on machinery

 

 

Adhesive vinyl labels, contour cut lettering, wide format printing, removable wall graphics and murals, floor graphics, window signage: all available from Imagesmith.  ImageSmith always provides you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. We work with you to solve any marketing problems. The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER. Ask Imagesmith!
Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.