Sunday, December 16, 2012

Breaking the Grid

The industrail Revolution has even affected the printing techniques, there fore the graphic design.
Printing techniques were changed from movable types to lithography, because the movable types started to restrict to make a design to an inflexible grid. Also the illustrations, maps, etc. were hand drawn and engraved, allowing for restricted, costly editions.

Thanks to the invention called lithography the mass production became much more easier and it enable the the type to be independent form the compositor.

Actually Alois Senefelder is the one, who invented the lithography in the 18th century with stone plates, to reproduce music notes. Lithography refers to a printing process that uses chemical processes to create an image. The positive part of an image would be a hydrophobic chemical and the negative part would be water. Later on, the plate is introduced to the ink and water mixture. The ink will stick to the positive image and the negative part would be dissapear with the water. A flat print plat is needed during this process for much longer runs.

For each colour separate stones were used and a print went through the press separately for each stone. The aim was to keep the images aligned. With this technique characteristic poster designs of this period were made.

In a short time, the lithographic process was used to create multi-color printed images, like cropped, embedded, bordered, free running type (Chromolithography).






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