As a consumer, you don’t tend to think about the background of the company who have created the article you are reading, or the website that you are on. You don’t tend to think about the culture, the rules and the history of the design process taken to create a newspaper, a poster or an advertisement. You just tend to read, view or listen to the product placed in front of you. The way people consume media products has changed drastically in such a short period of time that as little as 35 years ago, the internet had not been invented and the only way of reading the news would have been through newspapers – a form of print design. Since the 1980’s technology has developed dramatically and we now have other forms of accessing media products. Interactive design has flourished and there are now more ways than ever that we can access any form of design, from print to interactive websites.
The culture of print design is a very important topic which any designer must think about before creating any print product. Design is shaped by a range forces and these forces, just like any other, can push or pull into new forms creating something bigger and better than the forces before. There are three main forces within print design that shape all media products such as posters, leaflets and advertisements. The first main force is the Mechanical force, this force states that all design is produced by technology and that the development of design products is inseparable from technologies development. The more and more advanced we become with our technology, then the more and more advanced our media products will become. There is then the Commerce force, the force which believes that as attitudes changed towards printing and design and more people had an interest in the media products available, more people started to buy books and other print products. Typography developed due to print houses developing their own branding and typeface design, meaning each newspaper brand had a slightly different design aspect to the others. These two forces created another force called Standardisation which has many benefits from measurements to terminology and all other aspects of mass production.
Print design itself has been around for many years, the earliest piece of evidence recorded is from between 704-705 AD and was a form of woodblock printing, a technique used for printing text and images. This form of design originated in China and developed in Asia several centuries before Europe appearing first in Germany around 1320. Books were also created using this technique and the ‘Chengshi Moyuan’ was the first book printed in more than two colours. A technique called ‘Nishiki-e’ which means brocade pictures was created by the Japanese and instantly became a more popular and more widely used than woodblock printing was. This new technique was used for prints from the 1970’s onwards. In 1843, a new form of printing was invented by the name of Rotary Drum printing by a man called Richard March Hoe. A complete rotary printing press was perfected in 1846 and by 1847, Rotary press printing was a very popular way of printing. Today, there are three main types of Rotary Presses, Offset (an inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket and then onto a printing surface), Rotogravure (engraving an image onto an image carrier) and Flexography which utilises a flexible relief plate. Inkjet printing is one of the most recent inventions for print design and the concept for this was invented in the 19th Century. Inkjet printing is a type of computer printing which creates a digital image. It creates this by propelling droplets of ink onto paper, plastic or other textures. An inkjet printer is the most common type of printer used in the present day after being invented in the late 1970’s.
As print design has become more popular and the need for advertisements, leaflets and more has increased, many people in the media industry have formed an opinion on what they believe these designs are for. Some believe that when you are creating a print, it must be solely for the client so that they can relate to it, however a large amount of people disagree with this statement and believe that what you are creating should be about the artist exploring his creativity and that by focusing on the client he will not be able to do so. Due to this tension between the people on both sides of this argument, there is now one main, basic rule within the design aspect of any print product: If an object has to perform a certain function, the design aspect of that product must support that function as best as it can. This stands for both print and web design. Another rule in the media industry is how the style of a piece of work, for example the pictures included in an article or poster, must be relevant to the topic covered. This is so the consumer is able to fully understand the piece of media they are viewing without confusion.
With media becoming more and more interactive over the years, many people have started to focus on a digital side of print design. There are many advantages to the expanding web side of print design such as the fact that the internet is accessible in a lot more ways than that of a physical newspaper or poster. As you can access the internet through your mobile, designs such as adverts on the internet will be with you all the time you have your phone. However there are a few disadvantages to this side of the Print industry. Many people feel that advertisements in the form of Pop Up’s on the internet are more annoying that informative and a lot of people will block them, meaning that those adverts will not be seen where as adverts in magazines are usually a lot less annoying. Even though there are multiple Pro’s and Con’s to the print design now appearing online, it has become inevitable due to the amount of people who use the internet. Companies may feel that their adverts are being viewed more online than in a newspaper and will therefore continue to place advertisements on popular websites that get a lot of views each week.
Due to this, file formats have been created for not only companies but also the public to save their posters, pictures and documents in different ways to get the best out of each type of media. There are many file formats which have been created but only a few are very commonly used on a daily basis in the media industry and the table below shows exactly which ones they are and what those file formats can achieve.
Print design is still evolving. Each month, more and more file formats are being created and more and more adverts, posters and leaflets are being created for the public’s consumption.
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