Printing and Expectation

People see massive amounts of written material. There are many different kinds of paper: workplace forms and memos, labels, till-rolls, textbooks, novels, newspapers and magazines. In the last 30 years screens have become more common, first the green-screen text terminals, then Windows and the Web.

There are a great many messages. Journalist David Shenk estimated that the average American was targeted by 560 messages per day in 1971 but 3000 in 1991 - a phenomenon he called Data Smog.

Information Overload is a a term coined by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock and data-smog is a continuation of that.

If people are overloaded then they will initially pick out the unusual for attention. Paper shape, colour, logo and presentation will have an impact. Exception factors are likely to fade quite quickly. If a message is repeated a lot as some adverts are that might have an affirmative impact but it might trigger a bored rejection.

Almost anything is readable providing the characters are more than a millimeter or so high and contrast well with the paper. However people have strong preferences for the way they think things should be presented.

Newspapers

Newspapers tend to be big, larger than any other written publication. There has been a very strong association between shape, content selection and world-view.

Broadsheets were perhaps 749mm by 597mm in size (roughly A2). Part of the reason was to lower the cost. The full sheet spread is a reasonable size for a web of paper going into a high speed press and just needs one cut and fold action. It is common to print things on a wide paper web, but newspapers and maps are the only written matter commonly sold like that. Magazines and books are folded and cut much smaller.

Broadsheet format may have other uses. It allows a fairly long and complicated story space to be explained on one page, with a few adverts scattered around.

The word tabloid originally referred to the story style, journalism that condensed stories into something simple and easily-absorbed. Pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co were marketing their new tabloid pills as an alternative to the powders popular in the late 19th century and the same term caught on to describe anything small.

Use of the term tabloid to describe the content apparently preceeded the smaller form-factor used by tabloid papers, which are roughly half the size of broadsheets. Quite why cheap newspapers with shortened articles concentrating on crime, sex and celebrity news should have been smaller than the so called quality papers is mysterious. Perhaps a lower income means a smaller breakfast table, commuter train and office desk that wouldn't hold a broadsheet. Recently most of the quality papers have shifted to tabloid size but use the word compact to avoid the journalistic connotations.

Gutenberg's invention of movable type (1439) made mass production of books practical. Using a printer's "forme" to produce a page gives something in one colour and maybe a couple of fonts. Printed books are an improvement on handwritten manuscripts, text is clearer. Colour is now difficult to achieve, however; it needs an extra pass through the press. An extra pass is more than double the work because the two colours have to be kept in alignment. Some of Gutenberg's Bibles were initially printed in two colours with a red rubric, but the process was too difficult, subsequently he gaps left for the rubrication to be added by hand.

Gutenberg's Bibles have been described as one of the most beautiful books ever printed. Improvements in printing technique over the centuries were more concerned with lowering the cost. Universal education and mass literacy in the US and Europe in the late 19th century more or less coincide with the application of steam power to printing. A primary objective for most books is to educate and entertain at a price. Penguin books were the epitome of this, good reading material bound in paperback and sold for sixpence in 1935. Penguin printed a million books within ten months of the company's launch, an indication of what can be done with printing presses.

From the 16th century to the present writing has commonly had two forms:

What people see becomes what they expect. For many years printing had more respect than handwriting,

The first commercially successful typewriter was invented from 1868 on. It took several years to get a fully workable typewriter, Remington made its first machines in 1873. It then took several more years for the idea to be accepted. Potential buyers initially struggled to see the use of typewriters Typewriters bought the clarity of Gutenberg's type to single pages. It is also quicker to use a keyboard than to handwrite. By the 1980s most offices were full of typewriters. At the moment most computers have essentially just replaced those typewriters - its easier to delete mistakes.

Photocopying was invented by Chester Carlson from 1936 on, again it was

Colours can be printed by passing a page back through the press and neatly printing that colour in the right place, it doesn't work very well because there is a chance of mis-registration causing the colour to overprint the wrong place. Also most pictures contain many colours, an impractical number if they had to be done one at a time. Printers discovered that by using four colours; cyan, magenta, yellow and black, they could blend dots and make the others. Colour print is dealt with in more detail below.