Recent Work from Visual Identity

Visual Identity have been completing some wonderful projects for various clients recently. These include Raystede Centre for Animal Welfare’s quarterly magazine, a Treatment Menu for Worthing based beauty salon, Euphoric, Brighton College’s Young Brightonian magazine and a stunning brochure for Gravetye Manor which features some lovely finishes including embossing, Block foiling and spot UV (print and finishing by Gemini Press).

‘The times they are a changin’ 1970 – 2012

An article by Co-founder of Visual Identity, Richard Goalen.

My goodness, how design, artwork and printing have changed so dramatically in the past 40 years. Younger readers of this article will find it hard to believe how the whole process was so different from the simple computer-to-plate norm of today.

In the early 70s, the commercial artist was renamed a ‘graphic designer’ and small design studios mushroomed around the country. The demand for promotional literature and creative advertising in a flourishing market encouraged designers to be much more imaginative. Luckily, the restrictive method of letterpress printing with its columns of lead type and crude ‘blocks’ for photographs/illustrations was quickly being fazed out and replaced by extremely versatile litho presses. The era of paste-up artwork and film reproduction was born.

 Let me take you through the process. Once coloured feltpen visuals had been approved by the client, black and white artwork was the next stage. The designer secured their sheet of lineboard to his drawing desk and with a parallel motion and set square marked up their grid format. 
Galleys of phototypesetting were cut up and carefully pasted to the lineboard to form columns of type. Headings were created with rubdown Letraset. Logos were enlarged or reduced on a process camera and exposed to produce photo prints to size. Borders, rules and picture keylines were drawn by hand. The completed artwork was now ready for film production.

Same size ‘lith’ negatives were produced for each of the process colours (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). A skilled film planner/platemaker would hand cut and apply film tints to achieve coloured headlines, borders and panels. Film separations for photographs would be stripped where keylines were indicated. A final set of film positives were produced from these negatives and a set of plates for proofing the design.
Labour intensive, yes. Time consuming, definitely!

The mid 80s brought a new revolution. The computer was introduced to the printing industry. Hardware and programmes were extremely basic and very expensive. It was not until the early 90s after improvement to software, that the ‘Apple Mac’ became a worthy graphic tool, developing year on year to become the wizard it is today.

The start of the 21st Century has seen the disappearance of chemical processing, the reality of computer-to-plate technology and digital printing, which continues to become more and more sophisticated.

I wonder what the next 40 years will bring?