Questions and Answers
Like any field of human endeavor, graphic design and publishing have their own history and imperatives, unfamiliar to most people and perhaps baffling. Following are explorations of a few common questions that, I hope, will explain some of the whys and wherefores behind the demands and requirements under which designers and publishers must operate.
Why is typesetting so important?
Before the advent of the Apple Macintosh, Aldus Pagemaker, and the Apple Laser Writer—the first commercially available desktop laser printer—in the middle and late 1980s, typesetting was performed by specialists on dedicated terminals and phototypesetting machines. (Before that, of course, it was set by hand using actual metal type.) Typesetters, along with illustrators and paste-up artists, were considered part of the production staff, separate from the editorial or design staff.
As the new “desktop publishing platforms” displaced the older Linotype-and-paste-up methods, typesetters (along with illustrators and paste-up artists) increasingly were perceived as obsolete. Often, entire production departments were disbanded—some gradually, some all at once. More and more, designers began to handle typesetting as well as design, and the number of typesetters dwindled. This trend accelerated with the increasing popularity of electronic publishing and the Worldwide Web.
However, while this evolution was going on in the professional world, educational curricula lagged. Many courses of university study for graphic designers still are weak on typography, and despite the ubiquity of word processing software, basic typography still is not taught in secondary or high school.
Even HTML itself was created by engineers for the use of engineers, with little regard for proper typographical practices, though with the advent of such standards as cascading style sheets (CSS) and HTML5, the situation arguably has improved. Moreover, thanks partly to improvements in typeface file formats (particularly OpenType), a new generation of designers appears to be rediscovering the fact that good typography is just as important as good design. In some applications, like books and other text-heavy documents, it can be even more important. Properly typeset documents look crisper, more readable, and more professional.
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Why not just use Word?
Microsoft Word is a word processor. Notwithstanding broad availability and an ever-increasing feature set, it is not a page lay-out application like Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign. This results in a number of quirks that make Word files unsuitable for high-end publishing purposes. The most important is that, as with other word processor programs, Word places little emphasis on stability of line and page breaks. Simply changing the printer driver one is using can result in tremendous changes in the lay-out of the document, a fact calculated to give a pre-press operator migraines.
In addition, Word has evolved over the years from a modest text-editing program into the large, powerful application it is today. Imagine a family gradually adding to their small two-bedroom ranch house until it is the size of a mansion. Certainly it does everything that family needs, but it probably is neither as convenient nor as structurally sound as a mansion designed and built from the ground up to be what it is—to say nothing of aesthetic considerations. To use a different analogy: it is possible to use a screwdriver as a hammer to drive nails, but the job is slower, more tedious, and more difficult, and the results generally are less satisfactory.
Microsoft’s programmers have worked hard to streamline Word and to make it usable and useful, but it is not the proper tool for high-end professional publishing. A page lay-out program in the hands of a capable designer remains the best way to get attractive, readable, professional-looking results.
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Why “Catspaw”?
The term cat’s-paw is an old one, reaching back at least to the seventeenth century and possibly earlier. Originally it referred to someone who acted on behalf of a sorcerer or witch, whether as a simple tool or as a full-fledged confederate. More recently, it has come to mean someone who performs tasks at the behest of another. That bit of history, coupled with my own liking of felines in general, made “Catspaw” a natural choice for a name when it came time to set up shop.
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