What the Heck is a Giclée Print?!

You may have heard people talk about "Gicée Prints" or occasionally have a client ask for one. I'll confess, the first time I heard this term I assumed it meant some type of special printing process since it sounded fancy.

Giclée (pronounced /ʒiːˈkleɪ/ "zhee-clay" or /dʒiːˈkleɪ, from French [ʒiˈkle]) is a neologism for the process of making fine art printsfrom a digital source using ink-jet printing. It is basically a fancy term for a very nice, archival quality inkjet print. The Epson printers in the MCAD Service Bureau and Digital Photo Lab are the same models that many fine art printers use to produce their prints.


The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray"^[1]. It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne,^[2] a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.

These swanky dudes are making Giclées in their basement - if they can do it, you can do it!


(Info referenced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée)

Justin McKinley's Printscreen Magazine

In the Fall of 2008 our very own Justin McKinley did a project for his Web and Screen class where he set up his computer to take a screenshot every 15 minutes. He used the images and data to build a website but also to design a book for his Publications class. The result was impressive - simple yet effective and addictive for its voyeuristic aspect. (It is also one of the heftier books we've bound.)