E.H. GRAPHICS opened on July 1, 1985 with a tremendous investment in "phototypesetting equipment" manufactured and sold by the industry leader at the time, Mergenthaler Linotype. The typesetting unit itself sold for thousands of dollars. Those were the days of purchasing fonts as a strip of film; each typestyle costing nearly $300!! In other words, to have the Medium, Italic and Bold version of any typestyle, the cost was $900! We kept our fingers crossed that our "new" customers would need the styles we purchased!

 

The art of typesetting required memorizing literally thousands of codes. Although there was a screen, it was small and all input was surrounded by coding. Looking at the screen, no one would ever know what the final product was supposed to be. Our copy wasn't visible until we actually "developed" the film we used. Therefore, our equipment inventory included a processing unit, filled with chemicals and used to develop the film that had been installed in the "typesetting" equipment. After setting our type, we would take the receiving-film canister into a dark room to develop our copy. If there was even one typographical error, the process needed to be repeated.

 

Once the copy was proofread for accuracy, it was cut apart by a technical illustrator who then would apply hot wax to the non-copy side and paste the pieces of film onto artboard. This would continue until the final "mechanical" was ready to be given to a commercial printer. The printer would then shoot a negative and plates of our mechanical and proceed to print the required number of copies.

 

Obviously, from start to finish, creating a customer's work was time-consuming and costly, and, unfortunately, some of that cost was passed onto the client. However, fast forward to the middle 90s and the advent of the "Personal Computer." This was the greatest break-through in the graphic arts field. The equipment was expensive when it first appeared on the market, but nowhere near the cost of phototypesetting equipment. There was no need for a processor to develop film - you simply purchased a fairly expensive office printer. Unfortunately, the illustrator's job was slowly fazed out since the computer allowed us to create a visual "mechanical" directly on the screen. There was very little, if any, need for "cutting and pasting". Entire typestyle families were sold on a disk at an extremely reasonable cost. Overall, the cost to operate was drastically reduced, thereby reducing the cost to our clients.

 

Here we are now - 2019 - and nearly every home has a personal computer or laptop. The cost has come down to make it greatly affordable and printers can be purchased for under $100! However, the art of "typesetting" remains just that - an ART. Many believe that since they own a computer, they are able to do all of their own graphics and simply have a commercial printer do that rest. However, nothing could be further from the truth. True graphic artists must know every nuance of sophisticated graphic arts software and be very well versed in concepts of color. They need to go beyond merely "typing" copy on the computer - they need to be able to visualize the customer's needs and then execute this vision. E.H. GRAPHICS has been able to do just that! It's one of the reasons we have a large, satisfied customer list and have continued to successfully operate for over 30 years.