As I sit at my computer, finger poised over the mouse, ready to send our latest promotional booklet file to print, it is hard to fathom that the genesis of this process was woodblock carvings. Back in the sixth century, it was the Chinese who used this method to create the first crude printing impressions1. It wasn’t until the mid 15th century that Johann Gutenberg (no relation to Steve as far as I know) is widely credited with beginning the automation of the printing process when he developed the screw printing presses which combined oil based ink with punch-stamped typeface moulds on metal alloys1. This allowed for movable type and allowed for rapid reproduction of pages. This method proved so successful that by the end of the 15th century more than 9 million books were in circulation1.

Come the 21st Century and it is digital printing which has revolutionised the printing industry. While the internet and electronic publishing has become an integral part of our lives, the demand for printed matter is at its highest levels ever. The mid 80s prediction of a paperless society has so far proven unfounded. While the traditional printing press, albeit with bells and whistles which Johann Gutenberg could never have imagined, continues to be the mainstay of the industry, it has been in the area of digital printers that the greatest progression has occurred. These units can now provide a high quality finished product for short and medium runs and allow us to do so straight from the computer, doing away with expensive and time consuming steps involving film and plates. Items which used to take days, even weeks, to produce can now be completed in a matter of minutes.

As someone who has been in the industry for 13 years, it is a far cry from when we began. I remember the first ever magazine printing job we completed. At that stage we were using a printer in Geelong. The process involved our office sending through a hard copy of each of the pages. Geelong would then create a bromide and fax us a proof, we would then check the proof and send it back with corrections, whereupon the process would start again. It took us 6 months to put out that first magazine, and it took another five months until we put out another one. A far cry from today where we often produce five or six magazines per month on top of producing all manner of promotional material ranging from business cards to brochures to booklets, for our growing number of clients. It has been the digital revolution which has facilitated this expansion.

To cater for the growing market of short run, high quality, promotional material, we recently purchased one of Xerox’s Digital printers: the Document Centre C360. This unit has opened up a whole new range of printing options for our clients. From full colour booklets to short run business cards or black and white flyers, clients can now come to us in the morning with their request and have the items in their hands by the end of the day. The output quality of this unit is phenomenal and given that it can handle stocks right up to 220gsm most requests can be catered for.

Things have certainly come a long way and one can only imagine what printing revolutions await us in the future.

1. wikipedia.org

A Potted History of Printing

c 594 The Chinese use wood blocks to make printing impressions.
c 1450 Johann Gutenberg develops screw printing press (adapted from the wine presses which had been used in the Rhine Valley since the days of the Roman Empire). Oil-based inks, punch-stamped typeface moulds and metal alloys to mould the type were used. By 1500 more than 9 million printed books were in circulation.
c 1460 Printer’s ink invented only fifteen years after the first use of oil paints for pictures.
1500s Printing provided the first mass medium vehicle for advertising. Printed handbills began to replace the town criers.
1600s Newspapers began to appear.
1799 Printing by lithography was invented by an Austrian printer Alois Senefelder.
1803 Machine made paper begins to replace handmade paper.
1840 The manufacture of paper from wood pulp was accomplished this year.
1846 Hoe developed the first version of a rotary press.
1859 Photolithography. A French lithographer, Firmin Gillot, developed a new method for etching metal plates.
1863 William Bullock perfected a method of feeding paper into a machine continuously instead of by sheets.
1885 Linotype and Monotype machines were developed.
1889 Hippolyte Marinoni at the Paris Exposition demonstrated a rotary press which turned a roll of paper back on its path, enabling successive sheets of large and small size to be printed on both sides and then cut and folded into piles of completed newspapers, the whole operation performed at great speed.
Early 1960s Web offset presses were used for the first time for small newspaper runs.
Early 1990s the first digital presses enter the market

Dates provided with thanks to Peter Mercer, Curator of History, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.