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Print Production
I was first introduced to the printing industry at the age of 9 years. At that time my father was a printing engineer and he encouraged me to take an interest in printing technologies. I had been fascinated with colour from the first day of school when I learnt how to mix green from yellow and blue pencils. At that time my aunt was a supervisor at another printing company and on this basis it was in the family.
It was a natural progression for me to enter into the printing industry after I matriculated and by the time I was twenty-five I was managing director of my own company, situated in Artarmon, Sydney.
The following links are to an old brochure from the '80s, when much of the pre-press production was still analog.
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| • GCG Brochure Outside. | • GCG Brochure Inside |
While the business had started as a small printing operation it soon evolved into a specialised trade service to commercial printers, supplying colour separations and printing plates to large format and other specialist printers, primarily in the Artarmon area. Artarmon is the closest industrial area to North Sydney and is considered as the equivalent of "Hollywood", for the print industry in Australia. My clients included some of the finest printers and blue chip companies in the country including "The Pot Sill Press", "Megaprint", "Maps Litho" and "Rawson Graphics". Some of the projects I worked on were for many blue chip companies such as BHP, Aust-Wide Insurance, Bank of Tokyo, Westpac, Dept. of Agriculture, Price Waterhouse, Baileau-Knight-Frank, Jones-Laing-Wootan, Consolidated Currencies, a variety of magazine and book publishers and a host of others.
Quote Master - Print Production
Management Information System
In my business I began developing a Management Information System (MIS) in order to keep up with the demands placed upon my staff and myself. As time went by the application matured along with my coding skills, which had improved to the point that I decided to release a software package onto the commercial market i.e. "Quote Master". After almost twenty years of development this eventually lead me to a degree in Information Technology at Southern Cross University, where I attained a Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology with First Class Honours that qualified me for an Australian Postgraduate Award (i.e. APA) to approach my PhD degree. My PhD specialises in encryption technologies and is focused upon privacy and security in eHealth Informatics systems.
The printing industry has long made use of computers especially in typesetting. Before any desktop computers ever existed there were photo-typesetting machines that fulfilled the role of producing type that today's computers now provide. Information Technology as we know it today has been greatly financed from the revenue raised by investments in machinery and software by the graphic arts industries. This can now be seen in the correlation between graphic design, and web design. The same principles apply and it isn't surprising to find that an ever increasing number of printers are now also offering web-site design, along with their traditional services.
During the '80s the print industry was in the process of integrating digital with analog techniques where much of the editing work involved the use of airbrush and a multitude of darkroom techniques. Digital and analog was hybridised for around 20 years or so up to the point where digital could fully emulate what analog techniques could achieve. This depended upon greater processing power, increased data storage capacity and the development of the Internet and software applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Quark Express and Adobe Illustrator, which eventually led to digital techniques being able to provide far greater design features that analog could not compete with in terms of both the production time required and the resolution of the output.