Media designer's history: from Gutenberg to pixel

The media designer shapes messages so they are easy to understand and pleasant to look at — in print and on screen. But the profession was not born with the computer. It is a modern version of one of the oldest technical crafts of all: the printer's and typographer's art of putting type and images together into something that can be reproduced. To understand why we talk about typefaces, setting, correction and printing, you need to know the long line back to Gutenberg.

§Before printing: handwritten books

Before the shift

§Gutenberg and the loose types

The absolutely decisive breakthrough came around the middle of the 1400s when Johannes Gutenberg in Germany combined a number of inventions into one system: movable cast metal types. Instead of carving an entire page in wood you could now cast each letter individually arrange them into words and lines print the page in many copies and then separate the types and use them again. Combined with a press and fatty printing ink it made it possible to multiply text quickly and uniformly.

The art of printing spread rapidly and changed the world: knowledge could now be shared widely, and an entirely new profession of printers, type founders and later typographers emerged. Many of the terms a media designer uses today — typeface, composition, column, proof — come directly from this era of metal type.

§The industrial type: lead type and typesetting machines

In the centuries after Gutenberg, typography was refined, but typesetting itself was still manual labour: each letter was picked from a case and set up in hand. With industrialisation in the 1800s came typesetting machines, which could cast and set entire lines of lead at once from a keyboard. This made newspapers and books far faster and cheaper to produce, and it became the backbone of newspaper production for many years.

The craft divided into specialists: the typographer set the text, the lithographer and reproducer handled images and printing, and the printer operated the press. It was heavy, physical handwork with molten lead, ink, and large machines — and it took a long apprenticeship to master.

§Phototypesetting: light instead of lead

The next major shift came with phototypesetting in the 1960s and 70s. Instead of casting letters in lead text was produced by projecting light through negatives of the letters onto light-sensitive film or paper. Lead gradually disappeared from the printing houses and production became cleaner faster and more flexible. This paved the way for offset printing and an entirely new workflow where text became a photographic image rather than a physical piece of metal.

§The desktop publishing revolution

The change that more than any other created the modern media graphics profession came in the mid-1980s. The combination of a personal computer with graphical user interface, a page layout programme and a laser printer made it suddenly possible to create finished layout directly on the screen and see how it would look in print. This 'desktop publishing' revolution — with PageMaker on Apple Macintosh and the laser printer around 1985 — moved the work from the printshop's specialized machines to the individual designer's desk.

Shortly after followed image processing programs and vector programs that gave full digital control over photos and graphics. In 1990 Adobe Photoshop was released and digital image processing became accessible to the industry. The old crafts did not disappear — they became tools on a screen.

§The craft today: many media, same handwork.

Today the media graphic designer does not only make printed materials. Websites apps social media newsletters and video are just as important surfaces as the poster and brochure. Production is digital from start to finish and much of the finished work never appears on paper. Yet the profession still rests on the same basic principles that typographers have cultivated since Gutenberg: choosing the right font creating readable hierarchy balancing text and image and catching errors before they get expensive. The tools have changed from lead to pixels — but the craft of conveying a message clearly is the same.

“From Gutenberg's loose type to screen pixels the task has never changed: to make a message clear and pleasant to look at.”

— About the history of media graphics