A couple of weeks ago I was invited to visit an exclusive exhibition at 33 Portland Place, London, which detailed the history of printed material from the world famous paper company
GF Smith.
I won the chance to visit through
Grafik magazine along with a select few other students from across the UK.
Photos from the exhibition can be seen in the previous post.
The exhibition takes you through printing and binding methods used by GF Smith through the years and of course all the wonderful papers they have developed, all the way back to 1885.
I had never seen such a diverse range of printing methods/techniques and paper stocks in one place before, just taking in all the different processes blew my mind alone.
Of all that I saw my favourites were from the earlier 20's and 30's, the delicacy is extraordinary and of course back then all the typesetting and printing was done one by one and was very time consuming, making each piece slightly unique, even when they are the same print.
Into the 60's things began to get very interesting too, the introduction of well-known designers coming in to work on the covers and presentation material provided a fresh outcome. These designers included Milton Glaser, Saul Bass and Sir Peter Blake and then more recently into the 80's & 90's the likes of Peter Saville.
The whole show was overwhelmingly fantastic, a real treat.
All images below are shown in date order from oldest down to newest.
