Printmaking - Timeline

Paper arrives in spain

Woodblock is invented and becomes a popular technique for printmaking, USING INK ON CARVED BLOCKS TO RECREATE TEXT.

The first book is printed with text and images THE DIAMOND SUTRA

First moveable wood type printing is created in china

100, 000 moveable wooden printing types have been created by the Chinese country office aswell as 43 volume books

The Arabs learned the paper making from the Chinese prisoners and built the first paper industry in Baghdad

The rapid economic development of late medieval society in Europe meant the development of Gutenbergs metal plate based printing press.

Fust and Schoeffer entered into partnership that capitalized on the new process and developed the art of type-founding and the process of printing in more than one colour. The first book published by the firm was a Psalter, produced in two versions in 1457.

1500s - Early wallpaper featured scenes similar to those depicted on tapestries, Prints were very often pasted to walls, instead of being framed and hung, and the largest sizes of prints, which came in several sheets, were probably mainly intended to be pasted to walls. Often made using a wood cut technique

Woodcut is a relief printing technique in Print making . An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood —typically with gouges — leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts.

1725 - Stereotype printing is created

In printing, a stereotype, also known as a cliché, stereoplate or simply a stereo, was originally a "solid plate of type metal, cast from a papier-mâché or plaster mould (called a Flong) taken from the surface of a forme of type"used for printing instead of the original.

Electrotyping (also galvanoplasty) is a chemical method for forming metal parts that exactly reproduce a model. The method was invented by Moritz von Jacobi in Russia in 1838, and was immediately adopted for applications in printing and several other fields

1870 - Paper made from wood pulp is mass produced

1878 - Photogravure is created in its mature form by Karl Klic

Photogravure is an intaglio printmaking or photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio print that can reproduce the detail and continuous tones of a photograph

1913 - Commercial silk screen printing has been created

1943- The fotoseter, the first phototypesetter has been invented

Phototypesetting is a method of setting type, rendered obsolete with the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing software, that uses a photographic process to generate columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper

1955 - Digital printing begins to take rise

Digital printing refers to methods of printing from a digital-based image directly to a variety of media It usually refers to professional printing where small-run jobs from desktop publishing and other digital sources are printed using large-format and/or high-volume laser or inkjet printers.

In 1993 the world's first digital colour printing press was launched called Indigo

In 2000 the Hewlett Packard Company made a $100m investment in Indigo , which represented 13% of the company's outstanding shares.

In 2001 HP announced that it was to acquire the remaining shares of Indigo for $629m.

In 2010 the digital print markets were valued at $85.2bn