pasteup

Pasteup refers to the manual process of assembling a page for printing by pasting text, images, and other elements onto a backing surface to create a single, camera-ready layout. In traditional print production, pasteups were built on light tables using cut-out type, photographs, and artwork arranged in a layout, then fixed with adhesive to a board to be photographed for the printing plates.

Historically, pasteups were common in newspapers, magazines, catalogs, and posters from the late 19th through the 20th century. The process could involve hand-set type, film negatives, and halftone photographs; variations included photomechanical pasteups, where photographic images were pasted into a layout and then photographed to produce positive or negative plates. Color work often used separate color overlays and registration marks to align multiple color separations.

Materials and tools included wheat paste or starch-based glues, knives, scissors, rulers, and light tables; elements were trimmed and then glued to a rigid backing such as poster board. The goal was a stable, photographable page.

The rise of computer desktop publishing and digital prepress in the 1990s largely supplanted manual pasteups, with page layout software enabling electronic equivalents. The term pasteup persists in some studio and street-art contexts, where artists affix posters or artwork to surfaces with adhesive paste, commonly wheat paste.