Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 28

special issue: InnovatIon

The AdvenT of
CTS TeChnology

Illustration by Don Heyl.

Getting from computer screen to printing screen
proved to be harder than it first looked.
Kiersten Feuchter

nnovators, engineers, and tinkerers have been searching
for a way to accelerate the screen making process for
decades. For every printer, from the artist who burned her
screens in the sun to the multimillion-dollar retail graphics
provider with 18-foot screens, traditional prepress was an
arduous and expensive parade.
Of course, before the advent of digital artwork and computerized film production, this parade stretched on even longer.
"Everything took an amazing amount of time," says Richard
Greaves, an industry veteran and consultant. "A full-color set
of separations cost $800 to $1000 and took a week to produce.
And sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn't."
As innovations like PostScript, PageMaker, and eventually
Illustrator and Photoshop enabled and simplified digital art
creation, companies began exploring ways to leverage this
in the screen making workflow. The first hurdle was getting
output with a sufficiently dense black. Laser printer manufacturers like Qume, and then Xante, developed a way to lay
down a thicker deposit of toner onto rough, vellum-finished
paper; soon, early inkjet manufacturers took notice of the
"film issue" and found a way to lay down more ink, too.
Integrated digital imagesetting systems like the Autotype
Aspect gained strong footholds.
All of these innovations, of course, still required that thing
in between: the film. It was 1987 when Geoff McCue looked at
28

screenprinting

his office inkjet printer and said, "Wait a minute. I wonder if this
thing will print on a screen." That gap between the printhead
and the paper suddenly seemed like a space full of potential.
McCue was so convinced it would work that he went home
and bought his own inkjet printer, cut a screen down to 8.5 x
11 inches, and printed an image of the "Mona Lisa" right on it.
"I exposed it and washed it out, and it worked," he remembers. "I thought, 'Wow, this is pretty cool. You don't need a film
positive anymore.'"
It was quite an idea. When Screen Printing's own Steve
Duccilli detailed the possibilities of digital screen making five
years later, he posed a mock futuristic scenario - complete
with a robotic screen transport system - in which the screen
maker spent most of his workday sleeping because his job had
become just that easy (March 1992, pg. 60). McCue envisioned
changes that were just as radical - although presumably the
screen maker might find something to do besides nap. (Social
media wasn't around yet.)
McCue knew he needed access to greater resources
beyond a chopped-up screen and a desktop printer to take
his idea further. He was working in sales for Screen Printing
Supplies at the time, a dealer for Gerber Scientific Products,
the company that revolutionized computerized vinyl cutting.
Gerber was "toying around with inkjet printing," says McCue;
he wondered what they'd make of the idea.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018