With the loss of so many letterpress and small offset job printing shops in the 1970s and the explosion of inexpensive process offset printing in the late ’90s, it is considerably more expensive now to print two colors than four colors.
Some designers have reacted by creating four-color process designs, perfectly registered on the press, that mimic the appearance of two or three-color jobs that had not been aligned by the press operator. Color registration was a common problem in the past. Who could have imagined that someday we’d be nostalgic for low-quality printing—but designers cleverly worked with the limitations of old presses.