This article is about the company named Letraset. For halftone screens, see
screentone.
Letraset is a company that manufactures sheets of artwork elements which can be transferred to artwork being prepared. The name Letraset was often used to refer generically to sheets of dry transferrable lettering of any brand. This technique was very widespread for lettering and other elements before the advent of the computer techniques of word processing and desktop publishing.
Before computer techniques, when artwork was prepared by hand, Letraset sheets were available with letters in a large range of typefaces, styles, and sizes, symbols, and other graphic elements. The letters could be transferred one by one to artwork being prepared. This was always a tedious job, but the alternative, to do the lettering by hand, was also tedious and required graphic artist skills.
The name Letraset comes from the lettering application, once ubiquitous but now rarely used, although still available. Currently, Letraset's line of print patterns and textures are more commonly used than its lettering.
Letraset saw a decline in the sales of their materials in the early 1990s so moved into the desktop publishing industry, releasing software packages for the Macintosh such as ImageStudio and ColorStudio. 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.
Letraset is based on the Kingsnorth Industrial Estate in Ashford, Kent, UK. [1]
Letraset is the maker of the Pantone Tria Markers which have been renamed to Letraset Tria Markers since the new range.
In popular culture
Letraset is referred to in the Arctic Monkeys song Cornerstone with the line, "And she wrote it out in Letraset".
See also
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