PrePress: A History in Reprographics

PrePress was established in 1989 by Graham Scriven and Steve Sankey, who recognized an opportunity to provide exclusively digital prepress services. This venture turned out to be highly successful, as there were no other companies offering digital-only reprographics at that time. Most businesses continued to create plates using film and manual stripping, a labor-intensive and costly process. It is not surprising that labor unions opposed this emerging technology. The original partners had already experienced the impact of this advanced technology firsthand, having been made redundant as a result.

Our first Apple Mac and printer cost £6000 and only cam with 4mb Ram and 4mb storage. We quickly found that we needed somehow to increase this. It’s about this time we discovered the reducing images and using jpeg, although necessary gave poor printing results. Please remember =at this time there was no internet for research, nobody to ask or advise it was always sink and swim. The sales team simply did not care, they did their job and brought more and more work, it certainly was a steep learning curve.

Our first job was for West Midlands Ambulance in January 1990, they wanted single colour letterheads. The typeface was not available, (it was a lettraset typeface) we could not use letterset because this would ruin our ethos, so we digitised the font ourselves.

Our first a digitally produced magazine was produced in 1992 for Redditch County Council. 32 pages all saved to floppy disk, 44 of them!! Absolute nightmare. At the time we spent long hours using new technology with not a real clue of how to get to the end, but we did and in January 1992 GS Print of Redditch print our first digitally created magazine.

By 1994 we had our first GB hard disk, apple classic, Apple Mac II. and A G3 But the game changer was writable CD disks. At the time it was a godsend, now we could back up 600mb of data quickly and easily. For years this was the only way of have a fast backup. Daily backs were done highly on DAT tape, but often it would still running next morning.