
April 13, 2016
The D Word: Stock Cuts

The printer’s “cut” (a.k.a “cliché”) is as common to graphic design practice as yodelling is to mountain climbing in the Alps. Yodelling is an oscillating, trill, and often polyphonic sound that fills the snowcaped peaks with vocal resonance; printer’s clichés are visual noise—signs, symbols, vignettes—that fill mountains of empty printable space.
Pointing fingers were the most ubiquitous, watch faces, smiling and frowning heads, horses, fruits and vegetable baskets and funerary iconography have long been staples of the cut business—but thousands of others have been produced celebrating everyday events like birthdays, marriages, and Christmas. In addition to the garden variety of stand-alone symbols, there were comic cuts, symbolic cuts, and conceptual cuts—cuts that were impressionistic, expressionistic, and cubistic. Anything that looked good, gave relief to the eye, and helped tell a story. Most were anonymously done.Today’s pictographs and icons are direct descendents of the cliché. In fact some are direct copies too.
Observed
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Observed
By Steven Heller
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