You can’t fully appreciate the occupation of graphic design until you understand this…

Graphic design of the past, until the 1980s or so, was as much a hands-on craft as it was a sit-in-front-of-a-screen thing. Today, ink, presses, tools, chemical processes, and such are almost entirely avoidable if a graphic designer chooses to avoid them.

If you don’t know the craft side of it, I urge you to discover the great insights you’ll gain my understanding where and how our profession originated. British Pathé is a deep collection of cinema newsreels from (roughly) the 1890s to the 1970s. And among it’s 90,000-plus films are many gems regarding printing, typography, illustration, and so on. Here’s a start…

Lithography (1940-1949)…