I tumbled down a rabbit hole the last few days around the topic of graphic design techniques from before the era of “desktop publishing.” This means back when people used to do layouts for things like newspapers and magazines by hand. I found a few different good resources that I wanted to capture here with more specific details of the workflows, which I have been trying to, of course, emulate in Photoshop…
I absolutely love this one:
I am absolutely the kind of person who would love this kind of small fiddly detailed work. I can’t believe how much they would cut up the paragraphs and even words to fit the given space. Unreal, and I aim to try some physical examples of this process as well to even better emulate it for some related projects.
This one also adds some good context:
Lastly, there is an excellent documentary about the evolution of printing and design technology that I really recommend, called Graphic Means.
You can watch it here on Vimeo, but it is a paid rental/purchase.
As a bonus, this one is from the 1970s and deals strictly with newspaper layouts, and is I think very weird and judgemental, and partly for that reason interesting:
Anyway, one of the things I found lately while skimming through some old newspapers from especially the 1950s is just how hand-done the feel of the papers is, especially compared to results you get out of a tool like Adobe InDesign today. Whereas things made in Indesign tend to be very crisp, perfect, aligned, etc., old newspaper layouts from that period are anything but. They are very textured, very human. You can really feel it when you look closely at the printed material, and when you have a better understanding of these physical processes that created it, it suddenly all makes more sense.
