Letraset was a company known mainly for manufacturing sheets of typefaces and other artwork elements that can be transferred to artwork being prepared. Letraset has been acquired by the Colart group and become part of its subsidiaryWinsor & Newton.
Corporate history
The Letraset business was founded in London in 1959, introducing innovative media for commercial artists and designers. Their original product was the Letraset Type Lettering System. By 1961, Letraset's dry rub-down Instant Lettering was perfected. This was to be its core product for many years to come. Starting in 1964, Letraset also applied the dry rub-down transfer technique to create a children's game called Action Transfers, which would later develop into Kalkitos and many other series of transferable figures that were very popular up to the 1980s. 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. 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. Letraset thus began releasing many fonts in formats such as PostScript. Fonts from designers such as Alan Meeks, Martin Wait, 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. 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, 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.
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 frame and wetted with a paint brush to soften and release the gum arabic 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 much simplified and a dry transferable lettering system was developed, and it was this that made Letraset a household name. The range of available typefaces became extensive, incorporating both classic and contemporary type designs of the period, and each style was usually available in a wide range of type weights and sizes. Letraset sheets were used extensively by professional and amateur graphic designers, architects and artists in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. For the first time amateurs could produce affordable and attractive artwork of professional appearance. As a result, and because of its ease of use, it also came to be used by printers, design studios and advertising agencies. In the late 1980s Letraset started to be replaced by desktop publishing. 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 dry transfer lettering of any brand. This technique was very widespread for lettering and other elements before the advent of the phototypesetting and laser computer techniques of word processing and desktop publishing. Currently, Letraset's line of print patterns and textures are more commonly used than its lettering.
Lorem Ipsum
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.
