Black-Sky Thinking in the Graphic Arts.

Modern concepts of innovative or creative thinking can be applied to the graphic arts field as well as to any other, although this seems not to have been done as often as it might. Attempting to apply the technique of creative thinking in this area will illustrate both the method and some of the results that might come from it. Especially interesting are the creative methods involved in shifting processes around, eliminating some steps entirely, adapting technologies from neighboring fields, criticizing the evolution of the process, and making things larger or smaller. Such thinking applied to the graphic arts brings out such unusual ideas as: a single inking roll for letterpress printing, web-printing of books, printing microimages at a million pages per minute, magnetic printing, reusable gravure plates, elevating mimeography to a printing process, improving color printing considerably, overprinting as many as fifty images on a sheet of paper, coding manuscripts so that all typesetting would be automatic. Of course, not all of these ideas will be reduced to practice in 1963, but many of them are no more unlikely than xerography was in 1940 or than a color process for the Land Camera was even a few years ago. Tomorrow's breakthroughs will come from just such thinking, and they will appear no more probable than these ideas when they first appear. This is the way they all start.