In the 1980’s, Desktop Publishing was inflicted upon the printing industry. Its hard to imagine now how such an involved process, as publishing and printing, could have been possible without modern computers. Of course there were computers in many of the larger printing houses but they were for doing the accounts, stock control and wages. Steve Jobs (R.I.P.) changed all that. The Macintosh, with a white screen that looked like a sheet of paper, could do in a few seconds what a graphic designer and illustrator took hours to complete. When Laser technology was introduced the Macintosh could now output to film from which the printing plates were produced. Now the Mac(intosh) outputs directly to the printing machine and all the personnel and their skills who would have brought a print job to this stage are lost to history. That’s why I used the expression ‘inflicted’, because the illustrators, typesetters, layout artists, camera operators, film processors, plate makers, etc, etc were replaced by a single operator with a Mac. Now there’s digital printing.

I painted a few pictures recently specifically for printing as Christmas Cards. Check out ‘Prints from your artwork‘,’Going home for Christmas‘, ‘Christmas Morning‘. Digital printing allows small quantities of particular designs to be printed economically. I have printed 2 card designs which have details on the back of each card, of where the recipient can watch the YouTube video of the painting of that card. I’ve also included a QR Code for mobile devices. This sort of individual customisation of printed items, produced in small quantities, is only possible by digital printing.

Although the intention was to produce a few cards for my personal use, I include a link from this blog to an online shop where readers of this blog can purchase these cards and other items (calendars, etc when available) relating to the content of this blog.

For those interested, I’ve included a short video of the card making process.