For this report I am going to speak from my personal own knowledge. I began functioning at a smaller Midwest newspaper as a graphic artist in 1980. The newspaper was nevertheless undertaking some printing working with lead form but was transitioning to newer technologies.
This newer technologies involved cutting and pasting extended strips of text on paper that had just gone by way of a waxer onto a newspaper web page template. We made use of X-acto blades for cutting and glass rollers for pressing the text onto the paper templates.
For photos we made halftones. These have been developed with a compact vertical camera in a significant darkroom. The images had been imaged onto paper produced up of little halftone dots. These halftone photos had been produced, fixed and dried. Then they also had been pasted on a newspaper web page template.
In some cases we as well cut and pasted line-art either from stock books or produced by an artist to make the pages fancier. In 1989 I went to work for an additional newspaper, but this one had higher tech Israeli gear known as Scitex in one more division. I began out as a paste-up artist, then worked my way into the Scitex division on two various workstations that have been valued at in between $500,000 and $1 million apiece.
One workstation scanned higher resolution pictures and then we colour-corrected the images. The other workstation was a web page layout station exactly where we assembled images, graphics and produced newspaper pages that have been output to film.
In that year, the Art Division had an Apple pc with Photoshop 1.0 and Illustrator 1.0 loaded on it. These had been deemed "non-production" tools utilised by the Art Division just for producing art. These desktop computer systems did not have the horsepower of the Scitex system for making an whole everyday newspaper and outputting film.
In 1998, I worked for one of the main organizations that printed the Yellow Pages. Adobe lastly came about to building Photoshop and Illustrator that would work on a Laptop and not just on Apple Macintoshes. It was then that the graphic arts field actually opened up.
Scanners for the Computer became extremely low-cost, dropping from $500,000 to $5,000 in just a couple of years. Scitex workstations have been replaced by Macintosh and Laptop or computer workstations operating Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand and QuarkXPress.
And soon after Y2K came and went, the costs dropped even much more. It was now inexpensive for any individual to turn into a graphic artist or internet designer. Computer software, computer systems and scanners have been low cost compared to the early 1990's.
But, what I've discovered is that just due to the fact any one can now be a graphic artist, not any person need to do it. It really is like saying that due to the fact you understand to create a paragraph in college you qualify as a qualified writer or for the reason that you can take photos with your iPhone you are now a expert photographer.
There is nevertheless a place in the planet for experienced graphic artists and designers who have talent. Like any other profession, on the other hand, competitors is fierce. Mastery of the tools is necessary. I just can not wait to see what types of graphic arts tools the subsequent ten years will bring.
Mike S. Wilkins writes around graphic design packaging and promoting plus other subjects for of interest to the retail marketplace.
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