Background
By the late 1980’s it was common for designers to use Macs to set and output high-resolution type. But production artists still had to literally cut and paste type to create physical page layouts. These layouts were photographed to produce the film used to create the black ink printing plate. For full color projects strippers still assembled, by hand, the additional pieces of film required to create the cyan, magenta, and yellow printing plates.
The project
The goal was to output four-color film directly from a digital page layout application with no manual paste-up or film stripping.
In 1989 I proposed, wrote, designed, and produced the first color print job produced entirely on a Macintosh and output directly to four-color film. Other team members included a veteran Creative Services project manager and representatives and engineers from Crosfield, a supplier of high-resolution color scanning and output equipment, and Letraset, which developed the DesignStudio page layout application.
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I created “What can you get out of a Macintosh?” for distribution at the 1989 spring Seybold Conference. The brochure consisted of eight spreads (including one barrel roll) describing the range of Macintosh media.
Film was output at Crosfield headquarters in England and, to meet production deadlines, was hand-carried on a Concorde flight to Los Angeles. |
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