Showing my age
I’ve been a bit quiet recently because I’ve been carrying out some consultancy work with some lovely designers at a very big corporation. So when the very experienced designer I was working with said ‘so what is paste-up?’ I knew that my children were right – I am quite definitely over the hill, a relic, a complete and utter dinosaur. For any of you who don't know about how you put together a brochure or magazine before computers, the Fullerton website gives some idea of the torturous process us older designers went through. And I never had the luxury of a waxing machine, it was spreading all the galleys and artwork with cow gum and sticking them into place.
posted by Julie Oakley at Thursday, November 25, 2010
7 Comments:
From one dinosaur to another, Hi Julie.
As an ex-copy editor from the the 50's, all I know is paste up, old
clanging metal typewriters and thick thick pencils.
annie
You poor old thing! Not ever to be as old as me. Interesting how things have changed, certainly last time I had a day proceedure I was never asked my name and date of birth as often as yesterday, or which knee it was! What if I had not been truthful!
Oh my word, aren't we glad to have left all that behind... I didn't have to do 'finished art' thankfully, but as an advertising junior had to count characters in copy to find out typeface size, letraset headlines (I miss that stuff!), breathe in spray glue and magic marker fumes, enlarge and reduce images in an epidiascope... now, everyone's a designer!
For some reason I can't see your cow image here...
Ah yes, the good old days. Rubylith, red lead paint, overlays. Pantone to process conversions approximated by looking on a big chart. Spilling coffee all over the layout was reason for ritual suicide. I miss those times. (not).
And some of us used it to get up to the occasional bit of mischief (and forgive me for the bit of self-publicity here) http://www.davidthedesigner.com/davidthedesigner/2007/02/whatever_happen.html
I am so glad that I don't have to design like that any more. My astigmatism means that I could never spot by eye if something was not square so I had to check and re-check everything over and over with my parallel motion rule. However maybe if it was still like that there wouldn't be so many of us chasing so few jobs…
The other thing my colleague could not believe was that we calculated typeface, size, leading everything before ordering typesetting to ensure the text started and finished exactly where you wanted it to.
I was yarning with a stranger at a funeral tea (that our church folk do) and he told me about his life as a graphic artist for newspapers and companies and how they had to re-do everything in various colours, one pic at a time etc. It makes us think too about the process of making those very early Disney cartoons.
w.
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