Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

affordable scanners), gave designers and pre-press technicians all the
basic tools required to make the definitive switch towards digital production.
By now, every single aspect of the offset printing process has
been taken over by digital technologies – except the final mechanical
step involving the actual printing machine. For example, the halftone
simulation of colours and shades, and elimination of unwanted visual
noise artefacts (moiré), is increasingly done using a complex digital
calculation process known as ‘stochastic screening’ – something which
simply can’t be done through an analogue or mechanical process, because
of the huge amount of calculations required.
The next obvious ‘missing link’ towards a frightening (or promising)
science-fiction-like ‘total automatisation’ is of course human creativity.
Looking at two software tools that may be seen as prototypes of this
‘machine will replace creative people’ approach, N Gen 147 is the more
serious one, defined by its creators as a “rapid prototyping graphic
design engine that generates saveable graphic files from the user’s own
text content filtered through n Gen’s Design Modules”. The software
generates satisfactory, though predictably anonymous, post-modern
(mostly 1990s style) layouts, which cannot be distinguished from similar
human-generated designs. Though this tool cannot replace designers
for anything more than low-complexity jobs, the mere fact of its
existence may inspire these designers to broaden their attitude toward
producing more innovative combinations of form and content, instead
of always sticking to the same old rules.
Another tool worth mentioning is Adrian Ward’s Signwave Auto-
Illustrator, 148 formally described as “a (…) semi-autonomous, generative
software artwork and a fully functional vector graphic design
application (…)” The author invites users to “discover how easy it is
to produce complex designs in an exciting and challenging environment
that questions how contemporary software should behave”. But
the tool in this case actually comes with a healthy dose of irony, often
degenerating in unpredictable behaviour and sarcastic error messages,
playfully exposing the user’s dream of passing the workload on to the
machine and the consequent frustration of trying to get it to work
properly.
Another milestone in unpredictable digital intervention in printed
production is FontFont Beowolf, 149 a PostScript font designed to
change the shapes of characters during printing (and a quite extraordinary
piece of PostScript language programming). Just as any other
PostScript font, it consists of two components: one for screen display,
the other for printer rasterising. In this case however, the ‘nodes’
used to describe the letters are instructed to move around slightly at
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