Reinventing Print

Review by Paul Luna 
The Design Journal, 2019

David Jury’s wide-ranging book is a history of graphic design’s engagements with the technologies of graphic reproduction over the past century, and an enthusiastic argument for the physical over the virtual.

It provokes the question of where ‘craft’ lies in the practice of typography and graphic design. Is it simply a matter of the designer’s satisfaction in their work, or does it improve the experience of the reader? In 1956, Hugh Williamson implied craft was a knowledge of materials and processes, so that a well-designed book ‘tempts [the reader] to read it’. Williamson went further, and stated that ‘any perceptive reader’ could appreciate the quality of a book’s production, measured by its ability to open flat, and present ‘a clean impression and a clear reference system’. Williamson was concerned with the practicalities and economic constraints on book design in a commercial world. Writing a few years later, David Pye (1968) distinguished between the workmanship of risk, where tools, materials, and techniques are explored to press at the boundaries of what can be achieved, and the workmanship of certainty, when the aim is to achieve perfection and consistency. Williamson was thinking of this latter kind of craft – he wrote of book design as ‘an industrial craft’, and stated that ‘the importance of aesthetics in book design tends … to be overrated’ (Williamson 1956, xii). This is the craft of the impeccably typeset page, with even spacing, no rivers of white, little hyphenation, and no widows or orphans; or of the appropriate choice of different kinds of paper for text, plate pages, and binding.

David Jury is most certainly concerned with object quality, but his view of craft differs from Williamson’s (although Hart’s Rules is mentioned on page 139). He aligns himself more closely with Pye’s workmanship of risk and values the use of pre-digital design techniques and printing processes for their intrinsic physical properties. In the introduction, he equates craft with ‘creative endeavour’ as the element that adds a ‘vital generosity of spirit’ to a designed object. Craft ‘concerns the ability to control, certainly tools and materials’, although Jury does not totally eliminate the workmanship of certainty, stating that craft by implication presumes ‘knowledge of how to make a text readable’. His thesis is that contemporary designers, who have grown up in a digital age, have turned their attention to the past and appropriated earlier production processes, using them to create often culturally subversive media. In this he is not alone. In 2002, Anne Odling-Smee carefully categorized a range of post-digital techniques in The New Handmade Graphics. Odling-Smee saw the ‘handmade’ as a reaction to the computer’s equalization of media, that was ‘erasing the differences between text, images, sound and films’ (Odling-Smee 2002, 11), and as an attempt by graphic designers to escape from the role of technicians who, sitting at their computers, were simply required to execute their clients’ wishes. She identified two approaches: resuscitating obsolescent means of production, and using the handmade as an exploratory, creative method.

In cataloguing contemporary practice in a field she called ‘graphics’, Odling-Smee defined it broadly to include signage and other environmental media. Jury restricts the field of interest to printed matter, arguing that the word ‘graphic’ restricts graphic communication to ‘ink on paper’ and specifically ‘print’, rather than the totality of written and pictorial visual communication in any medium. Jury suggests that there was a liberating period of euphoria between the appearance of the Apple Mac and the rise of the Internet, at which point the predicted demise of print, and therefore, by Jury’s definition, of graphic design, threw a pall over the profession. Graphic designers would suffer the fate of the compositors they had themselves displaced. Jury then points to the continued existence of book fairs and the growth of the number of published books some decades later as indicating a ‘rediscovery’ of print. In reality, print had never gone away. Publishing, which in a broad sense is the aim of any graphic communication, is an activity that is agnostic to the channels it uses, in the same way that it was always unemotional about abandoning obsolescent print technologies. Airport bookstalls are still full of (printed) novels, but, as Jury points out, publishing genres which are capital-intensive when printed, such as dictionaries, have been the first to fall when challenged by the very different economics of publishing online.

In line with Jury’s historical approach, the first part of the book, ‘Print, technology and revolutions’, offers an international history of twentieth-century graphic design with full attention paid to the various printing technologies used and the emerging commercial role of the graphic designer. Jury traces the often-contradictory relationship between ideas of craft, self-expression, and working with the grain of mechanical reproduction. While the list of topics covered, from Morris to Futurism to Dada to Bauhaus to Paul Rand to April Greiman, may be a familiar one, Jury’s wide knowledge of the technologies and techniques used across the period adds a valuable dimension. He discusses (and the illustrations often reveal) the physical qualities of the examples he cites, so there is a focus on object-making rather than on the reader and the kinds of reading that these graphic objects, with their specific physical qualities, might have enabled.

The next part, ‘Immaterial technology in the physical world’, begins with a discussion of networking before the Internet, in the sense of publications that created communities: it shows how low-fi production methods were used in the 1960s and 1970s to create alternative magazines, self-published poetry, and fanzines, ‘fuelled by a passion for the tangible’. In this chapter the role of the reader certainly is brought into the discussion, albeit mainly through the idea that the author and reader of these publications were often one and the same, or at least like-minded in their enthusiasms. Of course, the craft-busting technologies used were not those of the traditional book printer, and were themselves new and disruptive, forebears of the digital. The variable-pitch electric typewriter, Letraset, photocopiers, and small offset litho presses were what enabled these communitarian and sometimes anti-establishment publishing endeavours. These technologies achieved their aim, allowing nonexperts and non-professionals access to self-publication; as such they are problematic for a historian who is also a practising graphic designer.

Take a Letraset advertisement from 1964, which implies that anyone can construct a convincing piece of artwork from its products. Is it a charming piece of nostalgia or a recollection of a threat to the profession? Less problematic evidence from the past are type specimens. Jury sees the recent revival of these publications, whose intended readers are themselves graphic designers, as evidence of the need for a physical manifestation of the virtual product that type has become.

The technology of electronic networking, and the possibilities of instantaneous linking of texts and images that the equalization of media to a digital data stream allows, are discussed in ‘Inevitability of digital technology’. There is a review of the idea of hypertext, which rightly touches on the problems of distraction and overload when such environments are used for learning materials, but which does not draw out the parallels that exist between hypertext and all manner of paratextual aids to reading which have existed, first in manuscript, then in print, since at least the twelfth century. Jury is unsurprisingly cynical about e-books: in discussing Amazon’s rise to dominance in bookselling, he identifies the function of its Kindle e-book reader as a bookselling rather than a book-reading device, and thereby explains its inelegance and lack of affordances for many kinds of reading. Jury observes, in a telling note about the fragility of digital formats, that his edition of an electronic novel from 1993 (announced as having ‘literally countless’ ways of being read) is no longer compatible with modern computer operating systems. URLs can stop working. In contrast, Jury convincingly argues in ‘The persistence of paper’, the physical book is long-lasting and permanently accessible – and through its life it may accrue the signs of use and wear that make it a valuable source of information to researchers in the future.

The chapters that follow discuss graphic design practice in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, and these will be the most valuable to contemporary students as a testament of a vanished way of working with Grant projectors, Letraset, phototypesetting, and paste-up – a way of working that, unlike aspects of letterpress printing, is irrecoverable. While there are still letterpress workshops at major universities – which survived, Jury points out, because of pressure from students against administrative imperatives – there are no boutiques where you can be a dilettante typesetter with a Compugraphic or a Photo Typositor. Being a designer in this period involved stuff, and different stuff was required for different tasks: folders of type specimens – the only means of access to what different typefaces actually looked like; circular slide-rules to calculate the reproduction scale of illustrations; cast-off tables to calculate the amount of space a piece of copy would occupy at a fixed-point size; Rotring pens of different nib sizes, and compasses and stencil templates with which they could be used to draw circles, arcs, rectangles, and polygons. Jury evokes working with this myriad of calculating and drawing tools that would soon be replaced by the single screen–keyboard–mouse interface for the computer (which now knew all the typefaces without specimens, and didn’t need you to cast off copy before you poured it in, because point sizes no longer needed to be fixed before proofing). He reminds us of the awkward, long transition to a fully digital workflow: even in the late 1980s and early 1990s pages designed on screen would be printed out on bromide paper by print bureaux and then pasted-up by hand to be photographed for plate-making.

Do electronic texts serve their readers better than printed ones? Can a return to (hand)craft redress an imbalance between the two media? Jury looks at survivals and casualties, and in doing so he introduces the idea of the reader and their engagement with a text through its physical form. He considers that print newspapers, with the reader absorbing the totality of their message through the mosaic layout of their pages, are poorly replaced by online editions where the focus of the reader has migrated to individual articles, which can be individually accessed, with the resultant decline in the authority of the editorial stance of the newspaper as a whole. He reminds us of the total eclipse of the print encyclopaedia, once the mainstay of any home’s bookshelf, but points out the enduring popularity of physical books for children, especially those with engaging features such as

pop-ups and cut-outs. Even student textbooks seem to survive the digital threat. Physical textbooks, he argues, are easier to flick through, to annotate, and the cues they offer to the content provide a cognitive map of the text as it is read. But these are arguments for the physical book (or newspaper or magazine) as such, whether or not it is particularly well crafted in Jury’s sense. (They would need to be well crafted in Williamson’s sense, I suspect.) In the final chapter, Jury turns to ‘The allure of making things’, and perhaps this is the driver for many designers. You can, of course, make a well-crafted screen interface (I would offer the systematic and elegant https://design.theguardian.com), but Jury would argue that any on-screen presentation lacks sensory excitement.

Although he sees hope in the fact that advances in software and hardware make screens ‘look and behave evermore like print’, it is what the screen cannot offer that is important. ‘Picked up and opened, the reading experience is so much richer because printed books engage all of the senses. Each book provides a different and distinctive reading experience – even the act of turning pages again seems to make the reader more involved and, inevitably, more receptive to the author’s words’ (page 196). Perhaps the screen is, in Jury’s eyes, really blank: he reminds us that the pages in his book on which he discusses digital technology are typically ‘bereft of visual material’ (page 195). Craft, Jury exhorts us, can be part of a virtuous circle where the designer’s enjoyment of physical materials and techniques is not just a matter of their personal satisfaction, but a means of giving the reader not only pleasure, but a more active engagement with what they are reading.