Pre-digital design required meticulous handcrafting through paste-up techniques – a labour-intensive art form that shaped the graphic design industry before the digital revolution of the 1990s transformed the creative process forever.
Before Photoshop and InDesign revolutionised graphic design, creating artwork for print was an intricate, hands-on craft known as paste-up. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, this method ruled the design world – a mix of creativity, precision, and patience that feels like a lost art today.
With a black Rotring pen, you'd carefully draw line illustrations by hand. Your work would then be placed on the repro camera – a massive device for precise resizing. Turning its handles until the artwork was fully in focus. Finally, in the darkroom under red light, you'd develop bromide prints, dipping photo paper in chemicals to develop your design.
Text was not as easy as selecting fonts with a click like today. Typesetting machines spat out narrow strips of text on galley paper. For fancy typefaces, you'd leaf through Letraset catalogues, buy rub-on letter sheets, and transfer each character by hand. Need resizing? Back to the repro camera for another round.
With text and images ready, the real paste-up began. A scalpel was your tool of choice to trim pieces with surgeon-like precision. A waxing machine applied a thin adhesive to the back of your cutouts, allowing you to reposition them on your layout board. Everything had to be squared up with a T-square for perfect alignment.
Adding colour? You'd annotate your artwork with Pantone references, specifying exact hues and how they should be printed – either as spot colours or through the CMYK process. Finally, your paste-up masterpiece went to the repro house. There, it was transformed into four acetate sheets for the process colours. After proofs and your approval, it was ready to plate then on to the press.
The painstaking craft of paste-up gave way to desktop publishing in the 1990s, making design faster and more accessible. But those who lived through it remember the difficult task of building layouts by hand, piece by piece. Next time you hear "cut and paste," think of the days when it was done with scalpels and wax – a true testament to the creativity and dedication of pre-digital designers.
Today, companies like Cambridge Marketing Ltd carry forward this legacy with cutting-edge digital print design services. While the tools have evolved, the commitment to quality and precision remains the same. Cambridge Marketing Ltd specialises in bringing modern branding visions to life, combining decades of design expertise with state-of-the-art technology to deliver impactful print and digital solutions.
