History of graphic art

The term graphic art began to be used after the invention of the printing press, which is attributed to Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, as a way of grouping all the trades related to typographic printing, that is, the arrangement of types, printing, binding, finishing and all variants or additional processes.

Later, lithography appeared, a printing system developed by Aloys Senefelder, who, knowing that water and oil repel each other naturally, used a limestone and a wax bar to make a print, revolutionizing the graphic arts. As time went by, the stone was replaced by a sheet of aluminum or zinc.

Due to the urgent need to generate better quality prints, pre-press or photomechanics appears. This new part of the printing process used large pre-sensitized sheet developing machines and special cameras to divide the colors of the images through the use of special filters that print on a negative the separate spectra of the colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. This set of colors is known in the Graphic Arts environment as CMYK (for its acronym in English: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key; this last term, Key, means "key" and refers to the impression of black and the depth it will provide to the resulting colors in the print). This printing technique is known as Color Selection. However, there is also another technique used in Offset printing, called Color Separation.

The evolution continues towards Offset printing, which significantly improves the quality of printing by using an indirect system, with three main cylinders or drums: Counter Drum, Printing Drum (Rubber or Blanket) and Sheet or Plate Drum.

Later, other forms of printing were coined such as screen printing, flexography, gravure or rotogravure, among many others.

Currently digital printing is included, thanks to technological advances and new technologies, the processes that were needed to carry out a job have been reduced. Nowadays, when we talk about art in the graphic arts, we refer almost exclusively to graphic design, because everything else has stopped being art and has become a technique.