Untold Stories from Arab Graphic Design (Recent) History:

Uncovering the mysterious practices of the paste-up process in Egypt

To delve into the intricate history of design, which is fundamentally embedded in the history of Art, Photography, and Printing without some foundational context, would be challenging. However, I trust that you—the reader of this newsletter—possess a certain level of familiarity with these interconnected histories, and thus I will only go over some key points that will aid a better reading of this text.?

Since the advent of Gutenberg's groundbreaking Letterpress in the mid-15th century, the evolution of printing technology has been nothing short of remarkable. The trajectory of advancing the technologies revolved around two pivotal fronts. The first focused on the processes of preparing artworks for printing (pre-press). The second—intricately intertwined with the first—concerned the development of printing presses.

Since the invention of movable type, we've witnessed numerous iterations, incremental developments, and significant leaps that have ushered us into the era of cold type. Notably, the paste-up process that we mentioned in the previous text was developed in tandem with the technology of phototypesetting and offset-lithography, which are markers of the cold-type era.

Individuals involved in the printing process had to continually acquire new skills, discard old ones, or refine existing ones to keep pace with the rapidly evolving technologies. And precisely in and through these volatile changes, the field of graphic design began to take on its modern form. The graphic artist emerged as a refined synthesis of diverse skills and specialties cultivated over an extended period. At each technological phase, the design process underwent slight changes, remaining in a state of constant flux. During this time, there was no such thing as default settings; everything had to be exactly specified in advance—the process was highly mathematical.

To illustrate what 'mathematical' actually means, let's zoom in on one design element that the graphic artist had to contend with: handling photography. Since the invention of photography, to print photographs we always had to recreate them as realistically as possible, through engraving and etching mostly, but those methods always fell short and never felt like photography. The problem was that printers can’t print grayscale. To overcome this, halftoning was developed, enabling the human eye, with its limited optical resolution, to perceive continuous tone images (photographs) using only black ink.

Preparing photographs for printing required halftoning, which necessitated shooting the image with a special process camera (repro-camera, see Fig. 1, left). These cameras were central to image reproduction and were continuously refined to be as compact as possible. They could perform tasks like enlargement, reduction, printing negative and positive films, and creating halftone images.

Halftoning was achieved by placing a layer of dot patterns between the original image and the final printing film or paper.This process transformed continuous tone art into thousands of tiny dots of varying sizes, shapes, and densities. When these dots were printed in black and white, they created the illusion of the original photograph's tones.

Eventually, other patterns of these screens were introduced, which allowed graphic artists to experiment with this technology to achieve novel and unconventional effects with photographs. This led to the emergence of a new sector dedicated to producing various contact screens, such as brick, grain, circle, mezzotint, and others (see Fig. 1, right), providing designers with an expanded arsenal of tools.

As a graphic artist during that era, you would have used the paste-up process as a part of your pre-press procedure to manually curate, create, and compose design elements on a gridded sheet (that we mentioned in the December newsletter piece). This involved dealing with elements of varying sizes and orientations, necessitating adjustments like cropping, scaling, adding effects, photomontaging, overlays, and other graphic techniques.

In the context of Egyptian design, let’s consider one of Mohieddine Ellabbad’s book design projects for the publishing house "Sharqiat." Ellabbad devised a unified art direction, which included a designated place and size in the layout for a portrait of the author using the halftone effect. Upon receiving one of the authors' photographs (either sent by the author or publisher), Ellabbad has on his hands a standard studio photo - measuring 6 x 9cm (See Fig. 2).?

So, it needed to be enlarged to fit in his layout. This required specifying new dimensions for the process camera operators, converting measurements from centimeters to percentages, as the camera machines worked with percentages. For this, a computer was needed, and not the computer you are thinking of, but rather what was also known as “a proportional scale” (See Fig. 3).

Ellabbad also combined this enlargement process with exposure to special effect contact screens to achieve the desired halftone effect. This involved specifying the correct halftone screen size and exposure time. The process required considerable imagination and often several iterations. Once satisfied, Ellabbad would glue or wax the final image onto the paste-up, alongside other elements. This completed paste-up was known as a “camera-ready” artwork used for making the final printing films, which in turn created final printing plates, and only at that point, the work was printed.?

Having journeyed through the evolution of printing technology, we can discern, if only in part, how these advancements were utilized and engaged with by Arabic graphic design practitioners, like Mohieddine Ellabbad. Each edition of this newsletter promises to unveil more thrilling insights into the ingenious world of graphic design, where creativity meets technical mastery in a dance of endless possibilities.

Stay tuned for more untold stories from Arab Graphic Design history.