Giclée gets printed on more labels than most people ever stop to question. It sounds French, it sounds expensive, and most of the time nobody explains what it's actually describing. So here's the plain version: what the word means, where it came from, and why it's the only way we print our own work.
Where the word came from
"Giclée" comes from the French verb gicler — to squirt or spray. It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working at Nash Editions in California, one of the first studios to use large-format inkjet printers to reproduce fine art. Those printers were originally built for prepress proofing, not art — but the results, once someone worked out how to control them properly, were good enough to pass as reproductions in their own right.
The word itself was a bit of a marketing move. "Inkjet" in 1991 meant the noisy desktop printer in the corner of an office. Duganne wanted a term that described what the machine was physically doing — spraying a fine mist of ink — without dragging along all that downmarket baggage. It worked. Thirty-odd years on, "giclée" is the term the art world settled on, even though the underlying technology is still, at heart, inkjet.
What actually makes a print a giclée
There's no official body policing the word, which means it gets used more loosely than it should. But properly used, a giclée print means three things: archival pigment-based inks rather than dye-based ones, a fine art paper chosen for how it holds ink and light, and enough printer resolution to reproduce fine detail without the dot pattern showing.
Pigment inks are the part that matters most. Dye-based inks are cheaper and give you a brighter initial colour, but they fade fast — sometimes within a year or two in direct light. Pigment inks sit on top of the paper rather than soaking into it, which makes them slower to fade, more resistant to water, and considerably more expensive to buy in the first place.
Giclée versus an ordinary print
A poster printed commercially in bulk is usually done on a different kind of press entirely, optimised for speed and low cost per unit rather than colour accuracy or longevity. That's the right call for a lot of things — a gig poster doesn't need to survive fifty years on a wall. But it's the wrong call for something meant to be framed and kept, which is why giclée and "print run of ten thousand" are two different jobs, not two price points on the same job.
Why we print this way
Every illustration starts as a drawing, done by hand on an iPad in Procreate — the process is the same as drawing on paper, just with more room to adjust before anything is committed to. Once a design is ready, we print it ourselves, in the studio, using pigment inks on paper we've tested for weight, colour reproduction and how it takes fine linework. We didn't outsource this part. If a print doesn't hold detail the way the original drawing does, it doesn't go out.
That's really the whole reason to bother with giclée at all. It costs more than the alternative, and it takes longer to get right. But if something's going up on a wall — a spotter's guide, a shelf of book spines, a row of beer mats — we'd rather it still looked right in ten years than looked slightly brighter for the first six months.
You can see the full range of giclée prints here.
