Old Skool Graphic Design. Life Before Macintosh.
What was it like to be a designer in the pre-macintosh days of graphic design? Compared to today…a living hell. Sit back and relax while we go back and relive the life of a graphic designer in the 1980′s.
The Studio Office
A typical designer’s office consisted of a huge drawing board, a T-square, a rolling cart filled with assorted production tools, a Pixar style lamp, and cabinets full of rubylith, zipatone lettering and illustration boards. There were electronics of course, like a push-button phone, a radio and a big time saving device – the electric pencil sharpener.
Creating Layouts
A good designer would typically need a week to create a detailed layout for a client and then another week or two to create “camera-ready” art for the printer. Creating a simple headline using transfer lettering or Zipatone lettering, was tedious and frustrating. Getting the letters to be in perfect alignment and kerned was an art in itself. Sometimes the letters would partially adhere to the paper or fall off. This typically happened while being presented to the client. A simple 8-page brochure layout could weigh 2 lbs. – thanks to the huge amounts of paper, rubber cement, markers, colored pencils, photos and staples to hold the book together.
Color Options
Today we have 1.6 million colors to choose from. Old school color selection was based on how many different color markers the designer had. Most designers had a huge set of pantone markers – very expensive ($250 a set) and they dried up quickly. Streaky marker layouts were replaced with color films. These solid colored films had an adhesive back to burnish onto the paper. The films were extremely expensive and if done incorrectly, large air bubbles and streaks appeared (kind of like the clear touchscreen covers for the iPhone).
Stock Images
If you think searching stock sites for the perfect photo or illustration is time consuming, think again. Back then a designer would call a large photo house such as Getty Images and request a search of photos, such as: people on the beach, ages 25-40, white, with kids, playing in the sand. Two days later, a box full of 3 x 5 film transparencies of beach images arrives. Designers then sift through hundreds of images using a lightbox and a loupe to see the image detail.
Using licensed photos came with a hefty price tag. The price was determined by how large the image will be printed, quantity of printed pieces, target market audience, and placement (cover, inside or back cover). It was not unusual to pay anywhere from $1500 to $3000 for a single image. Once the project was printed, designers had to return all the transparencies back to the vendor. If one was missing, then they billed full price.
Needless to say times have changed and computers have simplified and streamlined the design process. Now designers can spend more time “creating” art and less time “building” art. I found a cool site, The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies that features images of some of the retro art supplies and tools I mentioned earlier. I grabbed a few of my favorites to show below. Whether you are seasoned veteran or a rookie designer, you won’t want to miss this collection of early design “torture” tools. Check it out!
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Well written, wonderful! The memories came flooding back in massive waves, or was that flash backs from years inhaled spray fix? I was so excited I took out an exacto and sliced my finger tip off – I found it stuck to the spray-glue shield in my trash can. Thanks for sharing!
Awesome! I still have scars from scalpel blades and I’m sure there is probably untold damage in my lungs from all that spray adhesive. There is one tool I’m still trying to work out – a circular sizing guage! And I have drawers and boxes full of stuff I’ve hardly ever used and probably never will. Ah… those were the (expensive and wasteful) days.
That’s crazy. I give the old schoolers a lot of credit. No way I’d ever have gone to school for design if we couldn’t do it on computers. I do have a lot of spray adhesive stories, but that was just back when our college professors used to make us mount everything on black foam core, and then wrap it in acetate. What a waste of time…I can remember staying up until 2am finishing up my projects.
Most of those items there I still have from my manual layout days using typesetting machine applying hot wax, not paste, to the back of layouts.
Those were the days! I remember coming home from class (after pulling an all-nighter to make the assignment deadline) and finding my jar of rubber cement upside down on the comforter of my bed. There it was suspended at an angle upside down…how could this be? Earlier that morning in my student stupor I was madly gluing on a cover sheet for my presentation leaving behind a wake of ‘old school’ materials on the table, on the floor, on the bed—they were everywhere! The rubber cement just happened to land on the bedspread. All the glue ran into the blanket and hardened thus holding it up in this frozen position. Should have taken a picture…but that would have meant having film in the camera and getting it developed…LOL
Only thing missing is the hot wax applicator, a letraset pen/template set, and a lacey-lucy!
There is a flip side to this though and its a big problem with current design training. Everyone is learning on the computer completely and thing are swiftly becoming a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. I am shocked how many artists, designers, and architects that can not draw and refuse to even attempt it for quick sketches. They insist everything has to be done on the computer and the output you get is dismal compared to what folks could produce a couple of decades ago on simple things.
Learning how to do the basics of drawing and even simple things like spacing and such by hand really puts into a very different place in your learning than attempting it on the computer. I am not saying the computer is a fantastic tool that can even improve design, but it has become the only tool for most folks now and that show in their lack of understanding of a lot of the real basics.
Also the speed at which things can be done now can also be a real handicap as a lot of time it takes some subconscious processing of the project for the really great design path to come to the surface. Whipping stuff out quickly only keeps the design in the conscious part of the brain which eliminates a lot of the deeper feeling, subjective components and also is the much lower data rate processing than the subconscious which can do much more massive and rapid processing. This may be the place where the mind can really sort through a lot of variables to find the right combo for your design.
Todd, your profs did that to you to make you finish off your presentation with a good professional look and not just leave it on the computer screen. At times your presentations will be very important and having the skill and understanding that at times you need to stay up to 2am to do those final touches is important. Better to learn that in school than blow a presentation when there may be jobs on the line. These days also coming in with a very hand crafted “old school” presentation can also be very refreshing to many folks as most presentations just blur together and feel very unenthusiastic. Try rolling out a 7′ long drawing on a wall and you will have everyone out of their seats and really looking at what you are presenting. Show the same thing in a powerpoint and you will get yawns!
I trained as a graphic designer in the late 1970′s – we had this great big projector that you had to almost climb inside, to trace images of letter-forms from files of fonts, projected up from a bellows contraption. Anyone know what that thing was called?