Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of

typefaces A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

and other artwork elements using the

dry transfer Dry transfers (also called rub-ons or rubdowns) are decals that can be applied without the use of water or other solvent. The decal itself is on a backing material such as paper or plastic sheeting much like a transparency. The dry transfer is ...

method. Letraset has been acquired by the

Colart Colart, or the Colart Group, is a large international supplier of art materials, with subsidiaries and brands such as Winsor & Newton, Liquitex and Lefranc & Bourgeois.

group and become part of its subsidiary

Winsor & Newton Winsor & Newton (also abbreviated W&N) is an English manufacturing company based in London that produces a wide variety of fine art products, including acrylics, oils, watercolour, gouache, brushes, canvases, papers, inks, graphite and colour ...

Corporate history

Letraset was founded in London in 1959, with the launch of the Letraset Type Lettering System. In 1961, Letraset came out with their dry transfer lettering system, which pioneered the technique. Starting in 1964, Letraset also applied the dry rub-down transfer technique to create a children's game called

Action Transfers Action Transfers, also known as rub-on transfers, were an art-based children's pastime that was extremely popular throughout the world from the 1960s to the 1980s. They consisted of a printed cardboard background image and a transparent sheet of c ...

, which would later develop into

Kalkitos Action Transfers, also known as rub-on transfers, were an art-based children's pastime that was extremely popular throughout the world from the 1960s to the 1980s. They consisted of a printed cardboard background image and a transparent sheet of c ...

(marketed by

Gillette Gillette is an American brand of safety razors and other personal care products including shaving supplies, owned by the multi-national corporation Procter & Gamble (P&G). Based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, it was owned by The Gil ...

) and many other series of transferable figures that were very popular up to the 1980s.LETRASET was squired by the Swedish stationary company Esselte until 2000 when it was sold to a Management buyout headed up by Martin Gibbs and Michael Travers. Eventually sold to ColArt in 2012. Seeing a decline in the sales of its materials in the early 1990s, Letraset moved into the desktop publishing industry, releasing software packages such as ImageStudio and ColorStudio for the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

. These never saw widespread success. However, as Letraset held the rights to their fonts that had been popular on the dry transfer sheets, it made sense to enter the digital font market (see, for example,

Charlotte Sans Charlotte Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Michael Gills in 1992 as part of a larger family called Charlotte, which includes a related serif text face. The face was designed for Letraset. Charlotte Sans bears comparison with Eric ...

). Letraset thus began releasing many fonts in formats such as

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

. Fonts from designers such as

Martin Wait Martin Wait (1942–2012) was a British font designer and graphic designer. He was best known for his work for Letraset, which created dry transfer lettering used on advertising and other lettering projects. Wait was born in Forest Gate in Lond ...

, Tim Donaldson and David Quay were released, and many can be found on online retailers such as Fontshop. Some fonts retain 'Letraset' in their title, whereas others have been renamed by their new vendors such as ITC. A selection of fonts is still sold from its website, separated into fonts from Fontek and Red Rooster. Software include Manga Studio EX and Envelopes, a plug-in for

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

. Letraset is the maker of the refillable Tria markers, formerly Pantone Tria markers, which have a three-nib design and 200 colors. Additionally, Letraset offers three lines of dual-tipped markers, the alcohol based ProMarker and FlexMarker lines, each with 148 mostly different colors, and the water based AquaMarkers with 60 colors, all of which have gained wide acceptance in the hobby and crafting communities. Letraset was based in

Le Mans, France Le Mans (, ) is a city in northwestern France on the Sarthe River where it meets the Huisne. Traditionally the capital of the province of Maine, it is now the capital of the Sarthe department and the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Le ...

, having previously been based in Ashford, Kent, until being acquired in June 2012 by the Colart group and becoming part of its subsidiary Winsor & Newton.

Cultural history

The dry rub-down transfer techniques was used by the

punk movement The punk subculture includes a diverse and widely known array of ideologies, fashion, and other forms of expression, visual art, dance, literature, and film. Largely characterised by anti-establishment views, the promotion of individual freedom ...

because of its ease of manipulation, its low price and the quality of the rendered layout. Letraset's ease of use and widespread availability aligned with the do it yourself value of this movement by allowing punks to create designs independent from printers and publishers.

Product

In common usage, the name Letraset originally referred to sheets of transfer lettering which were originally manufactured as a wet process in 1959, with each character selected and cut from a sheet, placed face-down on a small

silk screen Screen printing is a printing technique where a mesh is used to transfer ink (or dye) onto a substrate, except in areas made impermeable to the ink by a blocking stencil. A blade or squeegee is moved across the screen to fill the open me ...

frame and wetted with a paint brush to soften and release the

gum arabic Gum arabic, also known as gum sudani, acacia gum, Arabic gum, gum acacia, acacia, Senegal gum, Indian gum, and by other names, is a natural gum originally consisting of the hardened sap of two species of the ''Acacia'' tree, '' Senegalia se ...

adhesive which held it. The frame was then turned over and the letter located over the artwork, and the character pressed into contact with the page, with the mounting base slid away as with model aircraft transfers. Later, in 1961, the process was simplified, and a

able

lettering Lettering is an umbrella term that covers the art of drawing letters, instead of simply writing them. Lettering is considered an art form, where each letter in a phrase or quote acts as an illustration. Each letter is created with attention to d ...

system was developed. The range of available

expanded, incorporating both classic and contemporary type designs of the period. Letraset sheets were used extensively by professional and amateur

graphic designers A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, ...

architects An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

and

artists An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the ...

in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. As a result of its relative affordability, and because of its ease of use, it also came to be used by

printers Printer may refer to: Technology * Printer (publishing), a person or a company * Printer (computing), a hardware device * Optical printer for motion picture films People * Nariman Printer ( fl. c. 1940), Indian journalist and activist * Jam ...

design studio A design studio or drawing office is a workplace for designers and artisans engaged in conceiving, designing and developing new products or objects. Facilities in a design studio include clothes, furniture art equipment best suited for design work ...

s and

advertising agencies An advertising agency, often referred to as a creative agency or an ad agency, is a business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising and sometimes other forms of promotion and marketing for its clients. An ad agency is generally ...

. In the late 1980s Letraset started to be replaced by

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

. Today Letraset sheets are traded on eBay and elsewhere, and sometimes used so that a designer can avoid a digital look. The name is also often used to refer generically to sheets of

of any brand. This technique was very widespread for lettering and other elements before the advent of the phototypesetting and laser

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

techniques of

word processing A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

and

. Currently, Letraset's line of print patterns and textures are more commonly used than its lettering.

Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum In publishing and graphic design, ''Lorem ipsum'' is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content. ''Lorem ipsum'' may be used as a placeholder before final ...

filler text has been featured on Letraset advertisements for decades. There are some indications its use predates Letraset, but nothing concrete has surfaced prior to Letraset's popularizing it.

References

External links