From lead plane to pixels — the history of digital media

As a digital media apprentice you work with screens code and digital tools. But the task is older than the computer: to put text image and sound together so a message is understood. To see why your programs and workflows look as they do it helps to know the way the trade has taken.

Long before the screen, people learned to reproduce text and images with letterpress printing. Type was set in lead, images were etched on plates, and a printer worked in mirror image and black and white. The fundamental approach — to separate content from the form in which it is displayed, and to think in pages, columns and margins — comes from this. The words you still use, such as typography, layout and colophon, are inherited from the print shop.

In the 1800s and 1900s photography film and sound recording came. Pictures were developed in a darkroom film was physically cut with scissors and tape and sound was recorded on tape. It was craft with chemistry and mechanics but it taught the trades something important: a medium has a format a resolution and a quality and the choices along the way cannot always be changed later. That way of thinking lives on every time you choose file format and resolution today.

The major shift came when computers became cheap enough to sit on a desk. With personal computers page layout programs and laser printers you could from the mid-1980s set up print materials on screen instead of with lead — it was called desktop publishing. Suddenly one person could write choose typeface place images and see the result before it was printed. It removed many steps in the chain and is the direct ancestor of what you do in a layout program today.

With the graphical user interface — windows icons and a mouse — the computer became something everyone could use. Images could now be scanned edited pixel by pixel and laid together in layers. The darkroom moved into the software. At the same time video and audio editing became digital so clips that once required physical equipment became drag-and-drop on a timeline. The trade went from waiting for development to seeing the change instantly.

When the World Wide Web opened in the early 1990s the media got a whole new place to live. Now content had to be not just printed or broadcast but displayed in a browser that could look different for each user. This forced the trade to think in flexible layouts, links and interactivity. With smartphones and social media the audience also became senders themselves and content suddenly had to work from a large screen to a small one in your hand. Concepts like responsive design and user experience became part of the craft.

Digital media has gone from physical craftsmanship to digital tools in just under two human lifetimes and pace is the trade's special feature. Programs and platforms change all the time but the basic ideas — separate content and form respect the format put the message at the center — have held all the way. If you understand where they come from you can learn new tools faster because you know what they are trying to solve.

“The tool changes every couple of years, but a good composition is just as correct on a screen today as it was on a book page five hundred years ago.”

— Professional view on the roots of media production.