What Was Used Before Photoshop: Graphic Design in the 20th Century
Long before digital tools and Ctrl+Z, graphic design was a tactile, manual, and often underappreciated craft. Here's what it really took to be a designer in the last century.
Introduction
🎨 Graphic Design Before Ctrl+Z
In a world before Photoshop, Illustrator, or Figma, being a graphic designer was a slow, skilled, and deeply physical process. Every layout was cut and pasted — literally — with scalpels and glue. Every typeface was chosen from drawers, not dropdowns.
And yet, the output shaped advertising, politics, packaging, and pop culture. This was the analog age of design.
✏️ Tools of the Trade
Here’s what designers used during most of the 20th century:
- Drawing boards with parallel rules and T-squares
- Rapidograph pens for line work and precision inking
- Letraset dry-transfer lettering (rub-on type sheets)
- French curves and templates for perfect arcs
- Pantone books for color matching (still used today)
- Photostat machines to copy artwork at different sizes
- Rubylith masking film for preparing screen printing plates
And of course: scalpels, glue, tape, rulers, and type catalogs.
Preparing a Design
Designers didn’t “export to PDF” — they prepared camera-ready artwork or “mechanicals” for printing:
- Text was typeset at a phototype house or typesetter
- It arrived printed and cut, ready to paste into layout
- Designers physically assembled layouts by hand
- Elements were aligned using wax rollers, tape, and patience
- Photos were mocked in with placeholders and marked with crop instructions
Corrections meant slicing, reprinting, repositioning — sometimes hours of work for a 3mm adjustment.
⏳ How Long Did It Take?
A poster might take days to finish. A magazine layout: weeks.
Because the work was so tactile, there was less iteration — decisions mattered more. Designers learned to be more deliberate, more decisive, more focused.
There was no going back three versions to “see which one was better.” The process encouraged confidence and mastery.
👨🎨 Was It a Full-Time Job?
Absolutely. Design studios, advertising agencies, and even printing shops employed full-time layout artists, illustrators, and typographers.
In larger cities, designers were respected professionals — often dressing sharply and presenting their work like architects or ad executives. Their work shaped newspapers, posters, packaging, and branding in ways that were culturally influential, even political.
Behind the Scenes: What Most People Don’t Know
- Typographers worked in dim red-light rooms when prepping phototypesetting film.
- Some designers trained in calligraphy and drafting, not visual arts.
- Rubylith film was sliced by hand with X-Acto knives to create stencil-like separations for printing — requiring razor-sharp precision.
- “Paste-up artists” often worked overnight shifts to meet press deadlines.
- Some studios had lettering departments, where artists manually drew logotypes pixel by pixel.
Many of these designers weren’t credited publicly. Their work passed anonymously into the world — elegant, bold, iconic — but their names rarely appeared on it.
Summary
Design before computers was physical, deliberate, and slow — but no less brilliant. It demanded skill, patience, and incredible attention to detail.
It was a time when a designer’s toolkit included knives and glue, not shortcuts and plugins. And although the process has changed, the fundamentals of composition, typography, and storytelling remain timeless.
“Next time you admire a vintage poster or mid-century logo, remember: someone made that by hand — one piece at a time.”
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