You can have a blank page now and the second you type in a word,
decisions have been made about typestyle and size and layouts.
And those defaults don't exist in a vacuum.
They came from a place.
In graphic design, before the digital age,
you had actual blank pages that you had to decide where to start.
From the cave artist of Lascaux, it started in Egypt.
This Roman alphabet inscription has profoundly influenced the carver.
The Chinese had pioneered the art of printing centuries ago.
- The Gutenberg-- Gutenberg-- - Johannes Gutenberg.
Gutenberg is the first to successfully combine
all the necessary printing components.
Since the days of Gutenberg,
the typesetter in a real sense has been the engineer of civilization.
Printers have advanced learning and have molded progress.
The printer has led mankind by the hand, so to speak,
into the light of modern society.
Okay, let's understand what happened.
Johannes Gutenberg decided he wanted to produce Bibles, mechanically,
that looked like they were done by hand, so he could charge hand-written prices.
Gutenberg had printed a magnificent Bible.
But what was more important,
he had printed not just one but 200 Bibles,
all exactly alike.
Moveable type gave them the ability to set pages
to have different fonts, different sizes of fonts,
and it stayed that way for a few 100 years.
Each piece of type had to be individually picked out of boxes,
set in lines,
justified, made up in form,
used on a press.
Pipe setting couldn't keep up with the pressings.
World-famous newspapers and small local presses as well
were caught in the same strangling trap.
The skills begun by Gutenberg remained fairly unchanged
for four centuries until 1886.
When on July 3rd, Ottmar Mergenthaler,
a German immigrant,
demonstrated a machine which today is regarded
as one of the 10 greatest inventions of all time,
the linotype.
What they have is a machine that has the ability to set lines of type.
When an operator touches the linotype keys,
pieces of brass punched with alphabet and numerical characters
are brought together into a line,
automatically spaced.
Type for nearly every newspaper in the world
and most books,
is composed by Mergenthaler's remarkable invention.
It was the machine that made mass education possible.
It brought the price of books within the range
of the average working person.
This is the machine over here.
Now, it's practically unchanged in 100 years.
I feel if old man Mergenthaler came back, he could probably go over to that machine,
sit down, and set up a couple of galleys of type
without any problems at all.
I started in production when there was only hot metal,
and type was set on linotype machines,
and we went to a letterpress printing.
And when that press ran, the whole building shook.
I mean literally, you could hear it.
It would go, "Doom, joom, joom!"
as the printing paper went through it.
I would work across what was called a "turtle" and a form,
from a journeyman.
We'd bring down a layout that was sketched by hand
and then we'd put together the page on top of the turtle
in the hot metal composition, line by line, line by line.
It was very tedious and very time-consuming.
The closest cooperation is needed between the page editor and the makeup.
I got it. I got it.
I gotta get it packed in.
Together, they almost talked the type into the page form,
coaxing, cajoling to make it fit
as they work against the clock.
From editorial perspective, it was very difficult,
particularly for graphics production like photographs,
because we had to go to an outside service to get an engraving made,
which was 1, expensive, and 2, very time-consuming.
Printing presses don't have gray ink,
so you have to simulate gray using patterns of dots.
You had large dots where you wanted black,
you had small dots where you wanted light,
and that's what a halftone is.
After the image has been developed and fixed,
the plate is now brushed with an acid-resistant powder,
picturesquely named "dragon's blood".
Again, the plate is heated, then cooled, then placed into the acid bath.
A rapidly-revolving cutter is chewing up unessential metal from the cutting plate.
And here is the finished plate.
Photographs and graphics were seldom used,
because of the expense and time required.
You had this unbelievable workflow
where all the pieces had to be done at different times by different people.
And all had to come together on the composing stone,
where someone put it all in position.
Okay, I won.
The linotype dominated.
But linotype machines were controlled by the international typographical union
that controlled the newspaper and commercial typesetting industries.
Postwar America was in a state of shell shock.
The focal point of agitation was an uneasy American Labor Movement.
In 1919, 4 million workers walked off the job
in 3.600 different strikes.
There was always this fear of a strike,
because if the newspaper couldn't get out that day,
you don't get a second chance at printing the news.
Hey, what's this, Joe?
What's what?
Blank pages.
Where's the news?
In fact, I have a newspaper here from 1923,
when the pressmen in New York City went on strike.
All of the newspapers in New York City combined and created one issue,
and it has all the logos of all of those newspapers.
Meet the Union Printer.
Printing is no easy job.
We look upon ourselves as just as highly-trained and skilled
as the men in the executive departments of the papers.
So you think you need a hike in wages, huh?
I don't think so.
I know so, Mr. Pelwick.
So the first reason that phototypesetting took over was in the newspaper industry
where they attempted to move away from the union.
Phototypesetting was seen as a way around that.
And now combine that with the movement to offset lithography,
this was a revelation.
Most of the newspaper industry had moved toward tape operation,
where they could produce coded tapes,
run it through their linotype machine,
and set the type automatically.
You could use a girl for your typesetting,
essentially a euphemism for a non-union inexpensive person.
Instead of fingers on keys, perforated tape does the work
like the old music roll in a player piano.
Automatic!
High speed!
Powerful!
Accurate!
Never gets tired!
Never gets sick!
Light is magic.
There is magic in the way it is created, in the way it travels,
the way it behaves,
and beyond the magic of light itself,
there is the magic of science, finding new and amazing uses for light.
The earliest phototypesetters began around 1900.
In fact, it was discovered in the 1920s,
but didn't come into use until the 1950s,
because of the unions more than anything else.
But all of these early machines were based upon the mechanism
of the previous hot metal machine
and they were kludgy, they were mechanical, they were erratic.
No one really bought them.
Two Frenchmen decide to throw all that away and start from scratch.
And they read a paper written by Dr. Edgerton at MIT
on stroboscopic printing.
We are now in the Stroboscopic Light Laboratory of MIT.
Dr. Edgerton said if you use a camera that's fast enough,
you can photograph something that's moving as though it was standing still.
Consider as an example this balloon.
With the high-speed pictures,
you'll be able to see what happens when the knife breaks the balloon.
And they said, "Well, we could have a font that was moving,
and we had a fast enough light, it would go through the character
and then expose the photo material."
And so Louis Moyroud and RenÃ© Higonnet
developed the world's first photographic typesetter,
which in 1949 is introduced as the "photon machine".
And they composed the first book, The Wonderful World of Insects.
The first thing done with hot metal was a Bible,
the first thing done with phototypesetting was a book on insects.
Cloister.
Bodoni.
Bulmer.
It was interesting to watch the transition of the sales, and marketing,
and infrastructure of font production.
In hot metal days, that was a very elaborate and complex process
bringing a typeface to market.
A lot of steps involved, a lot of manufacturing.
It was a big deal.
Places like the American Type Founders was a huge factory.
In these casting machines, developed, and built by American Type Founders,
a metal alloy is melted in a pot that is thermostatically controlled.
The history of typeface design is intimately connected with technology,
because typefaces are designs, they're concepts of how things look,
and fonts are how you deliver that design.
So to make a font, you have to understand the means of production,
means of how things are being printed,
and it's been the nature of typographic history.
Monotype and linotype both came out of the era
of trying to mechanize type production for an increase in scale
and an increase in speed.
Since it was work that was done in a factory setting,
there was a lot of control with incredibly tight tolerances
of how things are produced and how they print it,
because when they were manufacturing type at a major industrial scale,
things had to be consistent and it had to predictable.
So everything was tested, and tested, and tested and tested
with calipers and micrometers, and they knew how everything worked.
The very particular printing color of text,
that was produced with fonts for hot metal,
had to be replicated when the companies pivoted to phototype.
To do that, they had to investigate what it meant to switch
from lead being pressed down onto a surface,
compared to light passing through film, and multiple pieces of film,
as it was scaled.
When your whole production process switches to photography,
you have to have photographic masters.
To arrive at a printing plate, the magic word is "negative".
And one way to get a negative is with a camera.
The master artwork for the typefaces instead of living on paper
was cut into a piece of Rubylith, which, it's a film that the eye can see through.
The effect of phototypesetting on typefaces was really profound,
especially on typefaces that had very fine details.
Typefaces had to be redrawn quite a bit,
and those fine serifs had to be thickened up
and made more square to replicate the effect of letterpress printing,
that it was originally done for.
Look at the difference between those two.
Most phototypesetters ran the same way.
They had a font.
That font had to be in negative form.
So every character or glyph was a little negative.
They all moved, so you had to rotate them in some way.
They were disks, they were segments, they were strips,
they were plastic or glass or film.
The reason was that was the way they got around the patents.
So they all had to be different, but they all were the same.
They were negative characters.
There was a timing system that counted these little marks.
So 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Oh, there's the letter A coming up.
It would then flash a xenon flash lamp
and went through the character as it was moving,
but photographed as though it was standing still.
The light would go through a lens to make it bigger or smaller.
It must be obvious now to those of us employed in the graphic arts
that we will, in the next five years, undergo more changes
than any other industry in the history of our country.
When I first started typesetting, it was a male-dominated field.
There were hot typesetters and they were all gentlemen,
and there was some of us new gals that would come in,
and we were wearing skirts and that sort of thing,
and we were not well received.
But we were the cold type department
and that just was infringing on their trade
and so there was a little bit of animosity there.
I mean we were in awe of them,
because of their abilities and their talents,
but they weren't so crazy about us.
They did the same work we did
and they were paid double what we were paid.
My paycheck said X amount/2
and that meant that I was paid exactly half
of what the gentleman next to me was being paid.
Slowly but surely, women entered the workforce.
In our shop, it was primarily women,
and the reason for that was
the New York typographic industry was primarily union men.
We were an open shop or a non-union shop.
The men operated linotype machines.
Cold type machines was essentially glorified typing to them,
so they didn't wanna do it.
People that knew how to type and knew how to do this,
that were excluded from the other shops, gravitated to the open cold type shops.
So it was probably 80% women.
I think that phototypesetting did more to bring women into the workplace,
in the printing industry than any other single technology.
Cause of their nebulous intangible area of knowhow.
I won't use the word "creativity" here.
It's a little overdone.
Everybody is creative nowadays.
So let's be a little more down to earth,
and talk about professional art experience and ability.
Art ability.
Thank you.
Art ability and good old-fashioned imagination.
The huge difference was in who did the typesetting.
There existed a whole band of very skilled men and women,
the compositors.
You would ring the typesetter, you would name your typeface,
you would read the text over, and you would get it back.
So the telephone in those days was-- it was really vital.
The really important designers too, you couldn't exist without it.
Many a time, I would talk to the typesetter
and I'd say, "Okay, it's 5:00, okay.
But I need this typeset sheet tomorrow."
And he said, "Well, how soon can you get it to us?"
And I said, "I'm spec'ing it right now."
Okay.
I don't think people today realize how mathematical and detailed
the whole construction of pages was, and still is.
It's just done behind the scenes for you automatically.
This is a copy of Graphics Master,
which was sort of a Bible of the cold-type era.
You really couldn't see what you were gonna get
and you had to specify things way in advance.
So you needed a lot of references in order to visualize what you wanted.
This is a copy-fitting wheel.
You'd actually count the characters in your manuscript
and depending on the line length you wanted and the typeface size,
you could determine how much copy would fill up a given space.
If you had an hour to spec raw text-- I'm talking like this, right?
From this generic, maybe Times Roman at the time
or even you know, Helvetica,
there was a lot of design thinking already
at that initial stage.
Your decisions had to be arrived at quickly
to meet the schedule of another vendor.
"I'm just gonna scramble and send it to you by the end of the day."
And that's what would happen.
The way it would work would be that the designer or the creative director
would come up with an idea.
First thing that was generated was the copy.
That would get typed up on a typewriter and that would be sent to the designer,
and the designer would start sketching out ideas.
How they saw the layout.
They would narrow that down and start doing more refine comps.
All of the type had to be specified,
needed to figure out what the font size was,
what the typestyle was, leading etcetera.
All of that information would go to the type compositor
and that person would retype into a photo composition machine.
The output of that would be type galleys.
They would be these long strips of paper that would have columns of text in it.
Meanwhile, other parts of the layout would be developed
such as photography, lettering or illustration.
Once those came into the production artist's desk,
they would need to figure out what the size was,
where the cropping was.
Once they figured out the percentage or the size of the illustration
or the lettering or the photos,
they would shoot that on a Photostat camera to the actual size
that it would be used in the layout.
At this point, all of the elements,
the photography, the type, the illustration, the lettering,
all needed to come and be pasted up onto the mechanical.
Once the mechanical was done,
it would be sent to the printer in the proof pressroom,
they would shoot the mechanical on a large-format camera
and they would make negatives out of it.
At this point, the FPO photos were replaced
with the actual photos that would be used in the printing process.
All of these negatives would be stripped together
on a large sheet of orange paper.
The image at the point was transferred onto a metal plate,
which was then used for the printing process.
The first step in this operation then is marking up copy for photocomposition.
We'd get a manuscript in and then we had to put codes in,
because in those days, there was no WYSIWYG.
You couldn't see what you were doing.
It was just a bunch of codes.
You had no typewriter paper and you had no screen.
So you were typing blind called "idiot keyboarding", if you will.
So a whole new function grew up called the "markup person".
And they were very important in the process,
because the operator just followed those instructions
as they keyboarded everything.
The best markup people actually had a vision of the page in their head.
If you send style 2, style 3
and then at least one of our operators could envision that exactly in her mind.
I always thought it was quite extraordinary.
This is the markup procedure used to set a paragraph
in Spartan Book Roman type, shown as number 4 grid.
22 picas wide and in 12-point type size.
For markup I knew what I needed to do.
I would have to get the correct font
and I would have to set up my little punched tape machine,
and then I would just input, but you did codes.
You would say bell F.
That was for font.
And you put in whatever number that particular font was.
And then bell L for was line and length.
And then just input the type itself.
You would take the punched tape, line them up,
take 'em down to the VIP printer.
The input tape is loaded onto the reader of the control unit.
Bring 'em in to us, the operator,
and we would thread the tape through the machine,
and inside the machine, there would be a drum,
and on the drum there would be fonts,
which would be a plastic card, the size of a business card,
that would have an alphabet on it and symbols, and one would be Helvetica,
one would be Helvetica Bold, one would be Palatino.
There are 18 font grids in this turret.
Faces of type can be changed by simply removing the grid
and replacing it with one of the desired font.
We would spending these drums wearing white cotton gloves,
so we didn't get smudges on them.
And it was all coding, nothing was WYSIWYG back then.
0But if you got that coding wrong,
you had massive amounts of white blank paper
coming out of the proofer.
So that was very unfortunate.
In a day or so, they would send back galleys,
which were paper proofs.
You'd have to lay it out on the pages, determine if it was long,
if it was short.
It would then, before you'd send it back for revision,
it would either go to the designer or I would make some comments
based on the rag, eliminating the widows,
different kerning and spacing kinds of issues,
and the galley would be very, very detailed, marked up,
Go back to the type shop, wait for another galley,
hope it was really close.
You hope it didn't have to go back more than twice,
because it was so expensive.
If you couldn't manage that, you'd be out.
It was almost so scary.
When that package comes in and you're almost afraid to open it up,
like you know, it was like-- because you know, you're gonna be on the phone,
you're gonna be able to say, "Well, that's what you wanted."
"No, that's not what I wanted.
What I wanted was this that you'd understand--"
Well, you make these proofreading marks like,
"Oh, I didn't understand what that mark was."
You're bringing back terrible memories.
Every shop where they did paste up,
they had someone known as the "magic knife".
Two letters were in the wrong order.
They are people who were so good with an X-ACTO blade
that they could cut those letters out, move them around, and take them back down.
And you didn't have to go back for another proof, shoot it to film,
and then restrip it.
I remember Aaron Burns.
He would come over
and you have to take this for the time it was meant.
He would look at what I'm doing and he would say,
"Sweetie, can you move the period over a quarter of a point?"
I always kind of chickened out and said, "Set to fit."
So the typesetter would figure it out for me
and that's where I started to realize
that your typesetter could make you look so good.
They had the talent and ability, they would catch your typos,
they would proofread everything for you.
They would call you on the phone and go, "Are you sure you want this?"
When you walked into that final presentation with your work,
you're going, "Look, what I did!"
But you knew in the back of your head
that somebody else was making you look really good.
We of course had to do pasting, that was part of the game.
I saw a brochure from a university down in Kansas,
they were teaching a paste-up.
And I thought about that. I thought, "Paste-up.
Maybe there should be a seminar."
So that got me thinking,
and I tried it out in 1971
for one day,
and I had 30 people come here.
And during the '70s, that was our kind of a golden years.
The things that we made were made strictly for paste-up.
T-squares and paste-up boards, grids, and burnishing tools, a lot of that,
and wax and waxers, technical pens.
Well, people wanted to buy those you know, "Oh my, that pen!
I showed-- would demonstrate that, and you know, "Where can I get that?"
"Well, here's the catalogue."
Good news.
You don't have to be an artist
and you don't need a college degree to be a keyliner.
You do need proper tools and equipment.
And for that purpose, we're showing you the kinds of things
0that you may need in your shop.
All my tools are still here, ruling pens, compasses,
definitely a set of French curves, an adjustable angle.
And of course, the trusty T-square.
Every morning I would come in and I would shake my Rapidograph
and get the ink flowing to the tip, and I would start my day.
This is what we are going to do.
And I'm going to show you, even as a beginner,
how simple and easy it is to do.
First step in the process would have been to align your paste-up board
on your drafting table.
The boundaries of it were done with a non-repro blue pen
and it was kind of a strip ways sort of color that you could write on,
but the cameras wouldn't see it.
So everything I'm doing is manually drawn.
We now have a road map taped up on the board,
so we know what to do.
We have to literally cut each chunk out,
place it into position as you see on this layout.
How do we do that?
Well, the first thing we need is an adhesive.
Now a lot of people worked for pasting-up.
Back in the old days, it was rubber cement.
That's what we used.
And along came a fellow in Toronto that invented a waxer,
which had a little roller and you plugged it in,
you put the wax in there and it melted.
And you could roll that roller on to the piece of paper.
I remember the waxer putting the hard bars of wax into the waxer
and you know, kind of waiting for them to melt
you know, it's kinda-- it's like putting up a stick of butter
into a already existing bath of warm butter,
and you kinda see it kinda just melt in, fade away.
Now we lay that galley of type on the board,
we have previously, for purposes of condensing the time on camera,
trimmed out the artwork.
You know, you'd arrive at work in the morning,
you'd have like long scrolls of typesetting
that was an entire book on a long scroll.
That was these kind of cheap paper bags
that you might buy at the grocery store or something,
and it was my job to cut those galleys apart
and lay out the pages.
So you know, you had the boards
with non-repro blue outlines of the outside of the pages,
and all the crop marks, and the depth.
And you always wanted the two facing pages to be the same number of lines
on facing pages.
Really basic, basic, basic typesetting stuff.
It wasn't anything fancy.
At that time it was very common to use clipart for a lot of graphic design
and companies would subscribe to a service
where they would get monthly types of clipart.
This artwork was kinda precious, because you were paying for it.
So what you would do is, you would send it off to a cameraman
and they would shoot it,
and you would get a PMT or a stat that looked like this.
You didn't just look on the screen and say,
"Do I like that color gray or not?"
You had to say, "I want a 50% gray screen or a 12% gray screen, etcetera."
And even the line screen, the amount of dots per inch
was something you had to specify.
You would have to build each one of the colors separately.
One color on a sheet of acetate, such as this,
and then the keyline color would be on the board itself.
And a lot of times, you used a material called "Rubylith" or "Amberlith",
and what that would indicate to the cameraman was
this was a piece of artwork.
The Photostat machine was a very big part of the production department.
It was a very big machine.
It must have been about 8, 10 feet wide.
It had chemicals in it that had to be changed every week.
The way it worked is you would get the actual final artwork.
You would put it in the camera area and then you would shoot the Photostat,
which would be developed instantly and come out.
And what that was it was just used to scale and reproduce roughly the image.
And as long as you have technology,
there are always gonna be unintended consequences
that turn into something that's more significant
than what the intention was.
But the tool that I was most excited about was the stat cam.
It allowed me to create for a short period a style for the magazine I did, Rock.
I used continuous line screens, which were horizontal or vertical lines,
and I would take halftones and put 'em on Kodalith paper
that had a solarizing effect.
And I would use that for the covers that I would then cut rubies for
and get flat color and coloring.
And then put it all together on a board.
And in those days, every bit of artwork you did had to be scaled
and proportion wheels were on everybody's desks,
because figuring it out mathematically didn't make sense
when you had this nice little convenient way
of determining exactly what percentage to do.
You'd write FPO just so that the printer doesn't mistake it for final artwork.
So that was-- it was really important.
This is for a magazine called "The Rocket"
and the way it was set up was--
Okay.
The photographs were done in a photo booth
because we didn't have any money to hire a photographer
to take these shots.
I Xeroxed off those photographs, and stuck them down here,
and I wrote "FPO" saying that these are for position only.
These are to tell them where a halftone reproduction
of that photograph is supposed to go and exactly how to position it.
Then I cut an overlay with Amberlith
that you were supposed to knock out and be printed in a color,
in this case green.
And then this all the typography that gets knocked out in colors.
You can see very clearly how I sliced it all apart,
and made it curve around and everything.
And then, this was the keyline that I put on the top,
and I take-- it's a piece of tissue paper and I take marking pens,
and indicate how the colors were all supposed to work.
The thing that was most exciting was always the cover.
At Screw every cover was an illustration.
It would be up to the artists to come up with what colors they wanted
and we'd match them with PMS colors.
I would be hired to design a cover using hand lettering as a basis,
plus illustration to add to it.
I was good with a knife, I was good with ink.
So inking something, and then put it laying down color
and carefully cutting it, and then overlaying more,
that just sort of became my way of doing it.
Here's a title from a National Geographic book
called the "Story of America" and this was one of the pieces from it.
This was inked,
this is a film positive of that inking that we could produce for the black plate.
And then the artwork is a print of the same thing identical in register.
All these stars are cut out of overlay film,
which is a sticky back transparent film, that you put down,
you cut with your knife and peel away what you don't want.
Now all we have left to do is to fix all of the various elements.
So we start it out with pasta and that fits right in there.
Then we take pizza, that fits in there.
Take fine wines, that fits down at the bottom.
Beef and veal goes in here.
Then you would cut that out and apply it on your pasteboard.
They didn't have the ability to put drop caps into text,
so you would have to physically cut out your drop cap,
and you would have to plan for a space for that drop cap,
and then on your paste-up, you would put those together.
If there were any ruling or lines to be done,
I had to do that myself with Rapidographs.
On vellum, you'd overlap the corner, so you didn't have a blobby corner,
making them perfect.
And sometimes that was very time-consuming.
I hated doing paste-up.
I was terrible at it.
It required such precision, and lot of injuries with X-ACTO knives,
and hot wax everywhere, and putting every page number by hand.
I seem to have lost my little piece of art here.
It's probably underneath the straight edge,
so we'll pick that up.
The important thing is not to panic.
Whatever you've lost, it's around here somewhere.
Here we have our piece of art.
So we'll place that into position,
make sure that the vertical is indeed vertical,
and there we have everything in place.
But you had to burnish it.
If you didn't burnish it you know, it's not gonna stick.
Depending upon the complexity of the layout,
sometimes you had many acetate overlays.
This was a poster announcing a lecture
that Kathy McCoy was doing in San Francisco
for the AI G8 San Francisco Chapter.
And this was done in 1987.
I actually have the mechanicals.
Okay, so there's of course the overlay which has the color breaks.
For example, it says here, "a 100% yellow line",
which are these diagonal lines to your left.
So that a 100%, but then this frame here is 40% yellow.
So you would think, "If you have two colors,
shouldn't there only be two overlays?"
Well...
This is all done by Rapidograph.
Look how thin this is.
I had to make sure this was actually glued straight.
These are a series of dots that were all kind of glued together
with my waxer.
Okay, and this is the best part.
Look at these letters.
They were all cut one by one to follow a contour.
FPO, for position only.
This is Rubylith you know, 66%, because I wanted it lighter.
And the printer was very aware that you know,
he would have to shoot this separately,
but there were all of course all these registration marks.
I love to do this!
It's like a cut-and-paste collage really.
Overlays for every different color break, maddening.
I don't miss that at all.
This combination of bits and pieces of typography, lines, painting,
bromide prints, and traces are instructions how to convert that
into plates that'll print in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black,
the four basic colors,
which then mix together to create a full color page.
That is the kind of thing we did day in, day out.
Stylistically, one of the things you'll notice
in the early '80s, '70s advertising is
you saw a lot of this separate headline, bold,
and you think about the Volkswagen Lemon ad.
You've got the image and you've got the headline,
and you've got the body copy, and none of it overlaps.
I mean it's a great concept,
but production-wise it was very easy to do those ads,
because nothing overlapped.
If you had to send something out to another place
to be knocked out and turned around, that was another day!
When I had 20 ads that I had to get out in two days.
That was it. It worked.
The style of it, too, kinda drove a lot of style.
I remember leaving one of those full-page ads in my car
on a hot summer day,
and it got really hot in there, and that glue just releases,
and I came back and everything on the page had slid on the seat,
and my whole layout was gone.
If you thought "stripping" was a term applied to burlesque,
it can also be used to describe the trimming and positioning
of the final negative for a plate.
Great care must be exercised to position the negatives exactly,
for a mistake here can result in costly waste and spoilage
when the material reaches the pressroom.
You would send all of the original artwork,
the original photographs or original illustrations,
and it would go to the printer
who would then have some of those images shot with a camera
and stripped in to the negative that shows all the type.
So it was really up to the printer and the stripper to do a lot of that.
When we used halftones,
they were consisting out of four different colors:
magenta, cyan, yellow, and key or black.
There were black dots on see-through material.
But they described the red or the blue or the yellow.
So when you add 'em up together, you get the halftones.
So what you have is in the end, four films completely registered,
completely fitting on top of each other.
You track them by putting them all together
and making, for example, a proof.
Then you copy them on to a light metal,
some kind of alloy with a surface on it that reacts to the film.
It gets lighted on there.
There are some chemicals on it
which will only print whatever is on the film.
Once you have a film, you put it on the metal, onto the alloy,
with the chemicals on it and from that you print.
They would put it all together and send back a--
What was called a "blueprint", which was blue and white.
It was just to review and proofread.
Once that was approved and you had a sign-off on the "blues",
as we call them, then the printer would go ahead,
and make the plates,
and send you color proofs before you approved everything.
At that point, I usually went to the pressrun
to make sure the color was right, to make sure the registration was correct.
So it was an extremely time-consuming process.
Here's a better way to put words on paper.
A remarkable electric typewriter, the IBM's Electric.
The small shops that are doing forms and simple stuff,
they start to use the Vari-Typer to produce the art for that,
small printers, small typesetting services,
small newspapers.
They don't need photography, they don't need chemistry.
Everything is done right in the typewriter and it will justify.
In 1968 IBM came out with the IBM Composer.
It was a version of their Selectric typewriter,
with the type element ball, that could justify.
The problem is they had very few typefaces.
Other than payroll, the most dynamic expense that you had was
you had to keep paste with type releases.
The source for most new releases of typefaces was
the International Typeface Corporation, ITC.
They would come out with a new typeface and not just one face.
No, it would come out in four different weights,
plus italic, plus condensed,
plus italic, plus outlined, ultra-bold,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
So it would be a total of about 16 different weights
that you had to buy, because as soon as they released it,
the designers, wanting to stay hip, and fresh, and on top of things,
would send in manuscripts spec'ed in these typefaces.
You had to go out and get them immediately,
and if you didn't have them, you weren't gonna get the job.
And it was just that simple.
Making a 2-inch filmstrip of a really wild typeface
was not a big investment.
So suddenly, there was a huge outbreak of new type designs
from all over the world.
Dry transfer type, same thing.
Companies like Letraset did some very unique and unusual designs
that wouldn't have made sense in any other era.
And what we call a "frisket" is this master piece of artwork
cut on a piece of Rubylith cut out with a knife,
so that you have incredible precision of line
and it's the crispest version of what would then get reproduced
and softened.
This is how they worked at Letraset as well.
It wasn't just about making films for typesetting.
That was a skill in itself,
because your characters wouldn't have passed muster
unless they're absolutely spot on.
Stencil cutting to us was in some ways an end in itself
and I think that some of the artworks with stencil cutting
are literally artworks.
You know, you can put 'em on a wall.
But all it was at the time was just one stage in the pro--
- In the production-- - Yeah.
Process, yeah.
This is just how you got from something made with a hand
to a photographic master that you could reproduce.
The company were really very keen
that we should interpret the typefounder size.
We weren't designing typefaces
that at the time was interpreting very well-known types.
So we went to the expense of buying the cast type
from the foundries,
we joined type pi and so we had a license to do this.
How about a modern, fresh design with overtones of the now generation?
And after a little while, Letraset was creating more new faces
and launching new faces than it was relying upon metal faces.
I mean one of the titles that it was given was "the liberated letter".
You gotta remember this was in the '60s and '70s,
when there were lots of other things going on
associated with design, such as music, fashion, and so on.
The Letraset typefaces were great typefaces.
These were now available to everyone who had a couple of dollars to spend
and didn't know how to set type or didn't know how to do a mechanical.
Letraset was a product, and photosetting was a service,
and that was the main difference.
Letraset was cheaper than photosetting, and it was quick!
We used to think Letraset was for a professional user,
without realizing that it was a very democratic product
and students could use it or people who were not familiar with typography.
We used to stick our noses in the air if we saw bad typesetting.
But in reality, it set about a new wave of typography.
To say that Letraset is an amateur product,
I don't even consider that a criticism.
It's a great democratizing effect about Letraset that I love.
When you don't have to go to a third-party vendor to set your type,
when you can just go to an art supply store
and buy some letters for a few dollars, you can make a poster for yourself,
you can make a magazine for yourself.
What's incredibly important about Letraset in type history is that democratization.
And I even see it in ephemera that came out of fringe communities,
who were able to do things.
You know, you look at like The Black Panther magazine,
you look at queer publishing, and all kinds of people
who just had a little bit to work with
or maybe had trouble finding professional vendors
who would do their work.
The only way to do it was use this methods and materials:
Letraset, paste-ups, photocopies.
You can divide all phototypesetting into two worlds: display, big type
or text, small type.
They would deliver strips of headline material
exactly the way it was done in hot metal and the designer would paste all that up.
However, with phototypesetting you could do something
you couldn't do with hot metal.
You could kern them.
One of the pieces of equipment
that I found taught me the most about type was a Photo Typositor.
You'd position the type and then you decide to print that letter
and then you would move that and you'd position the next letter,
one letter at a time.
The chemistry was built in, so as you were exposing the letters,
they turned black inside the machine.
You looked through a little viewer
and that was reference point for the next letter.
Every single letter was a unique decision,
"How does this look in relationship to the previous letter
and how do I think it's gonna look in relationship to the next letter?"
It allowed you to have tight spacing and remarkable kerning,
and that's what the designers wanted, tighter and tighter spacing.
So you look at all the design from the '60s, and '70s,
the Typositor made it all possible.
You could smash type and overlap type,
and so anybody who was a fan of Herb Lubalin, as I was,
could approximate what Herb was doing.
Because photocomposition allowed for lenses that zoomed,
instead of fixed focal length and things like that,
they started to introduce the ability to set multiple sizes, multiple typefaces,
all on the same piece of paper.
We would sometimes send out lettering that we distressed.
You know, we'd put a kind of rough edge on the letter
and the printer would come back and say, "Oh, by the way,
I've cleaned up your lettering."
And you said, "No, no, no! It was supposed to be like that!"
And I was actually working at this local company
when the first punk bands-- and again talking mid to late '70s,
and the printers could not understand that we wanted things
like a tape that was sticking down a piece of type.
We wanted the tape left and they would...
So there was always this kind of battle between printers
who have this sort of kind of purest notion
that everything should be super clean,
and then designers wanted to experiment and use odd techniques.
What everyone wanted was to see the page the way it looked
when it was gonna be printed out.
Tons of errors crept in,
because no one could see what they were doing.
The big movement was, "How do I get closer and closer
to seeing what that looks like before it comes out of the output unit?"
Now there was a comedian at the time-- what was his name?
It'll come to me in a second.
Flip Wilson.
His girlfriend was Geraldine and he would go into that voice,
"What you see is what you get."
What you see is what you get.
John Seybold liked that line so he said, "What we need are WYSIWYG displays",
and that's how the term came into being.
When I went to Atex
and we had a team working on the development
of a graphics display terminal...
There's a big piece of hardware, size of a desk basically,
because again, the components had not been miniaturized.
As time went on, the technology of the phototypesetting machines changed
from electromechanical, using lenses and light,
to cathode ray tubes.
A synchronized movie camera automatically photographs
the fast moving images
as they're plotted and drawn on the face of a cathode ray tube.
The problem is there were no frontends
that could make a page in position to drive them.
That was the thing that was missing from the industry.
The Seybold Conferences started in the cold-type era
when computer technology first started driving photocomposition.
Seybold Conferences was where companies went
to make big buying decisions
about what technology they were gonna invest in,
and in those days, an investment was big.
There were like 300 different machines that were available at that time,
specifically for this industry.
And newspapers didn't wanna give up their technology
and invest in something very new.
Many of the bigger papers hung on until the bitter end.
Well, take the New York Times.
When I went over to the New York Times, I went straight into hot type.
In fact, I worked on the very last hot-metal page
at the New York Times.
This New York Times mirror image in lead, of tomorrow's dateline,
reads backwards as Sunday, July 2nd, 1978.
It was the last night when the last page was done in hot metal.
For me having grown up with photosetting, it was just a jump back into time.
It marks the last day of an age-old method of printing
in this composing room.
Using 535Â° molten lead,
it set solid lines of type called "hot type".
This worker chalks up his sentiments.
I remember the day that they got rid of almost all the linotypes
that were sitting up against the wall, just dead, waiting to go to Japan.
The systems they went to, had to change radically.
Switches and buttons, at a touch, bring us
into an ever-advancing world of automation, computerization,
and programmed electron flow.
It was a huge investment and we would buy things
that were immediately turned obsolete.
So we had two Scitex machines, we had one still in a box, a huge box,
and one that was set up to be used.
And Scitex was an old-school computer.
I mean it literally filled a room this big.
You've seen them in science-fiction films in the '60s.
The banks of cabinets down one wall with the spinning tape,
that was the system they used.
And I found it very interesting, because...
wouldn't it be great if all those things would set in the one box?
It all happened in 1984, 1985.
We'd written up a basic functional specification
for a page-layout type of device.
We were actually using IBM PCs with very rudimentary graphic cards.
It was going to be a challenge
'cause we really didn't see how we were going to do it.
All of the images you're about to see on the large screen
will be generated by what's in that bag.
I can still remember this, we were working in a little studio apartment
down in the Pike Place Market in Seattle.
An Apple employee came
and brought in two prototype Macintoshes out of the trunk of his car,
and he said, "I think you guys need to play with these things."
And that was the beginning of the desktop publishing age.
Hello, I am Macintosh.
It sure is great to get out of that bag.
On Sunday morning, a very good friend of mine knocked on the door
and said, "Greiman, you're gonna get up and go see this computer."
And I was like, "I am not getting out of bed to see a computer."
And he goes, "Yes, you are."
And I was like, "Where are we going?"
He's like, "Macy's department store."
So I saw my first Mac at Macy's department store.
And right now, we'll let you take one out for a test drive.
I stood in line you know, for a few minutes to use it
and then after a while, Harry grabbed me and just said,
"There's like a line out the door people wanting to use this thing."
And I said, "What is this thing?"
So I bought one very early on,
like a moth to the flame.
What were the steps that led us to this kind of a user interface
that we're dealing with right now?
We had this vision of workstations
that had high-resolution bitmap graphics and mice,
and networks tying them together,
and laser printers and file servers, and just what you see beginning to happen.
So maybe in someday we're gonna have one of these things in our home,
and you can write a letter to grandma, and have a picture of the kids there.
Yeah, sure, sure.
And I think that's at the base of what this whole revolution is about.
Everybody can use it.
The first people who got interested in desktop publishing
were not traditional publishers or graphic artists.
Really.
They were computer people who said, "Oh wow, cool!
Now I can do graphics and I can do bitmaps."
And so the early folks in that field were not really
the traditional people saying, "Oh, this is cool.
I'm gonna make this."
There were a few that recognized it,
but mostly they were kinda geeky computer people.
It took a while.
Coming from the Swiss training,
learning about grids, learning kind of the discipline of design,
the Mac was like a great liberator
of not only just what you could create with your mind,
because it would just not do what you wanted
or it had its own kind of thinking.
And then you'd go, "Well, wait a minute.
Actually, that's better than what I was thinking."
There were sometimes we'd shoot off the monitor,
then we'd print it out, then I'd do something else to it,
then you know, scan it, get it back into the computer,
and you know, let it be.
I mean it was just crazy.
So I got very interested in starting with an idea
and then just letting the tool lead the way,
kind of co-creating or co-thinking with the technology.
First when I was in San Francisco, that was where I landed 1979,
I had no idea that the epicenter of design was moving
from New York or the East Coast to the West Coast.
And in fact at the time, there was the California New Wave,
they called it "Nuevo Wavo",
and it was in keeping with the magazine that April was involved in, WET magazine.
I was on the national board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts,
AIGA,
and in one meeting the elder New York-established
male graphic designers, who were also on the board at that time,
something came up about computers,
and they just said it was like the worst thing
that had ever happened to the profession
and that they would stick with their pencils.
So there was probably a quote out there somewhere from me
that the computer's just another pencil.
That was also not a very popular remark I made.
And of course, the loudest negative voices were in New York.
In a way, this was a West-Coast tool
and a West Coast kind of bunch of youngsters.
Every technology, that's ever been introduced,
has met the complaint,
"It's not the quality of the previous technology."
And yet it goes on to replace the previous technology.
And if you ask me to this day what quality is, I have no idea.
It's in the mind of the beholder.
The Apple Macintosh has received an unheard of kind of notoriety.
Our commentator Paul Schindler has some thoughts on Apple's media image.
The two Macs in this world,
the Apple Macintosh and the MacDonald's Big Mac,
have a lot in common.
They're both over advertised shiny boxes whose contents disappoint.
Apple wants the Macintosh to be taken seriously in the office,
and I'm sorry, but I just don't think that's ever gonna happen.
The machine is wonderful, but it's flawed.
It's too expensive, it isn't fast enough, and it's in black and white.
I just don't get it.
I did what every person
that buys a computer for the first time does.
They just try not to see it in the room,
and walk around it, and ignore it as long as you can.
I remember that first time with that Macintosh,
it was like when Spiderman got bit by the radioactive spider,
he was like, "Oh my God, I feel pretty powerful here!"
Also still that insecure uncertainty of...
..."Is this art?
Does it exist?
What should I do with--" you know,
"how can I make sure that this is really--"
In the beginning, I couldn't get used to it,
just the idea jumping from tactile art on your drawing board to...
...a magic trick.
The first time I encountered the Apple Mac was at college,
yeah, Manchester Poly.
They acquired, I think it was two Macintosh Pluses,
and this would be 1985.
Not that many people were interested, so we just signed up
for every available slot you know, and I just--
I was in that room pretty much as often as I could be.
Yeah.
You just plotted--
You know, the first time I used a Mac,
and although you thought you were typing in Times Roman or Helvetica,
when you output, it was in the days prior to EPS,
so you didn't get these nice, clean curves.
You got this bitmapped look, whether you wanted it or not,
and I loved that.
Nobody could accept the quality of pixelized type
that was, you know, a seasoned profession at that time.
We were a little cautious
when we introduced a computer for the first time.
We wanted to get to know it
before we committed ourselves to too much work using it.
And in the beginning, we used it to do typesetting.
- We can't tell-- - Yeah.
That the word "manager" is in Helvetica and the rest is in Times,
because the screen representation is so poor.
When you print this, things are even worse.
On a dot matrix printer, for example,
things were still jaggy or entirely the wrong size
- as you can see on the screen-- - Yeah, yeah.
The top line is much larger.
While the impact of electronic publishing
has just begun in the professional world,
it's easy to see its appeal to individual publishers.
It's relatively inexpensive and fast.
The print quality, while not yet up to phototypesetting,
is fine for smaller jobs,
but best of all desktop publishing puts the power of the printed word
within the reach of everyone.
I remember feeling like I was learning to walk again
for the first time trying to use this mouse,
and after a while I wanted to rip the thing out of the computer,
and toss it across the room,
and go back to typing you know, bell, star, semicolon,
and just typing in code-based commands.
But it was coming and we had to deal with it,
and deal with it we did.
People's desire to communicate
overrode the technology and limitations of the time,
and I always thought that was a good thing.
Everyone was trying to learn more about how the computers behaved,
because they clearly were a timesaver.
Everyone's topic of discussion was, "I've printed out a piece of paper.
Now what do I do with it to make a comp or to make my mechanical?"
While the computer came out in 1984, there were only three programs on it.
There was MacDraw, MacWrite, and MacPaint.
And so you know we would use MacWrite in order to just do some typesetting.
Go to the computer lab you know, set your type, print it out,
take it upstairs to the studio you know, cut out the letters,
see what you need, and then if you-- none of those work, then take it down--
Go downstairs again you know, reprint it out, and then cut it up,
and lay it out.
You know, do whatever you have to do with it.
Everyone is still in this middle period of introducing digital tools,
but the production methods were still all analog
and assuming analog means of reproduction.
It was in this kind of transitional period of some pre-digitals, some digital--
I'm not sure.
It's like what'd you call that period,
as sort of a hybrid production environment.
We didn't really recognize it as such at the time
that being taught two different languages simultaneously
had a mixed gouache with super precise tolerances,
but also had a, I don't-- layout, a page,
and get it to come out of an imagesetter.
I drew up these templates
and then I would output 200% or 300%, 400%, whatever it was,
a detailed option.
So you didn't just stick 'em together with magic tape,
so that you know, the artworks would then be quite big.
Sometimes, we'd positioned stuff with you know, extra PMTs or photocopies,
whatever we could get our hands on
and then that would be put onto the camera, PMT camera,
and reduced down to size.
You know, the type would come out really nice and crisp.
Now when the Macintosh first came out a little over a year ago,
the big question was, "Where is the software
and will there be software?"
Well, the answer, now that we're a year into this, is certainly "yes",
Joining us now in the studio is Paul Brainerd,
the president of Aldus Corporation,
the man who invented the word "desktop publishing",
and the guy who also brought us the product "PageMaker".
It's like a three-legged stool.
There was Adobe, there was Aldus, and there was Apple.
You took one away, it'd fall over.
American entrepreneurs' dream is to have the right product
at the right time with all the right customers lined up.
Well, that's exactly what happened here at Adobe Systems.
In January of 1985,
when Apple unveiled its LaserWriter printer.
Historically, what really happened here was
I saw the LaserWriter about nine months before it's produced
and said, "This is gonna turn the whole world upside down."
I went to Paul Brainerd and said, "This is what you oughta be working on."
"But you need to go talk to John Warnock at Adobe
and you need to go talk to Apple."
When I visited Adobe they had a prototype, it was to become the LaserWriter,
could actually output at high resolution to meet the needs
of the professional graphics world.
And so the gap between LaserWriters
and the professional typesetting had been closed,
and in that moment I knew
a revolution was coming.
Paul, if I go out and buy a desktop publishing package,
what can I do with it?
What it allows you to do is use your personal computer
to integrate text in graphics, and put it together on a page,
and print it out on a laser printer,
you get a high-quality result that then can be reproduced
on an office copying machine or at your local print shop.
Most of the PageMaker interface, and dialogues, and the way it works,
the basic functions came from my experience
of having done paste-up myself with a razor blade or X-ACTO knife.
This kind of postscript interface could be used in a sense to--
Or maybe even encroach in the whole typesetting industry.
Is that really true?
Absolutely.
Postscript was designed with the graphic arts industry in mind.
In other words, it does do halftones, it does do full typefaces, ligatures,
kerning all the words
that the typesetting industry's been familiar with.
I look at work done in that period,
I'm appalled at the amateurism of some of the typesetting.
We were very meticulous,
but we made mistakes.
And when we did, I thought, "Oh God, I wish we had--
still got some really skilled types compositors to do this job.
We are amateurs."
And that was the way it was for some 10 years.
However, now we've got a hang of it.
And I remember specifically that leap where we finally figured out
that we could compose it on the screen and it could all come out as one.
And it was like the heavens parted and the angels started to sing.
It was like we didn't look back after that.
There was this point and I was at Dark Horse Comics
where we had to tell the whole staff that they could no longer paste-up.
They had to do it on the computer.
In the early '80s, you saw a lot of this whole movement
of stuff just being collaged all together, because you finally could.
Here's what happened next.
Once we had the ability to use a laser to expose an entire page
with everything on it on film, why did we have to have film?
Why not have a plate?
And so now the platesetters were born and computer-to-plate or CTP came about.
So it was a natural evolution.
It only took 30 years, but we went from phototypesetting,
to image setting, to plate setting, and of course now digital printing.
You can't see the forest for the trees sometimes, you know?
I mean looking back you can say,
"Wow, this is the biggest democratization of typography, media, and technology
since Gutenberg invented the printing press."
Hands down.
This process that for centuries had been a full-scale industrial endeavor,
in one way or another you know?
It's carving punches by hand
or engraving matrices with intricate machinery,
all that was done with.
You could actually design a typeface speculatively.
That was a really new idea and it took me some number of times
to explain that you could actually you know, design a typeface on a Larke.
The type publishing process felt like a closed shop really,
and I remember that process, 'cause I was there at the time
and we would draw-- you know, we would be drawing quite big letterforms
and you would send it off to them
and then somehow it would be made into a useable typeface
that could be phototypesetted, but that process was just--
We had no idea how that happened.
It was a closed shop in that respect.
So of course when Fontographer came out, it blew that thing wide open
and enabled you know, anyone with any inkling and desire
to make a typeface.
The Emigre couple, Rudy and Zuzana,
came from a great tradition and education in typography,
and they were also you know, I think, one of the most important forces
in really making type image you know, so it was no longer
that you know there is the beautiful type at the bottom and then there is the image.
The type became the image, and type became really kind of editorial,
and it could be the main message you know, and it could have a real personality.
It could have many voices, it could-- it just became so expressive.
"The Emigre's doing this.
They have a magazine, they are selling fonts.
Hey, maybe that'll work to support our magazine habit."
This is the font-- the first one that I did, this one Block.
And then what I remember the kinda really wacky one was...
Block Extra,
which people complained couldn't read.
Steven Heller wrote famously the article, "Cult of the Ugly."
You know, there was Massimo Vignelli,
called it "the blight on the clean grid of modernity",
which I quoted in the magazine.
I have four favorite text faces
and about ten favorite display faces.
I don't want any more.
I don't want to get on with a job knowing
that I'm going to be using standard typeface equipment.
I think the present obsession with designing new display fonts,
for example, is absolutely absurd.
I take no part in it.
I have been responsible for designing some alphabets,
but very few.
We have all we need in the way of typefaces, more than we need.
Well, there's always something lost you know, right?
I mean that the concept from McLuhan, right?
Every extension also produces an amputation of some kind.
So I guess the question just becomes like,
"Is the extension worth the amputation?" you know?
"Do you think anything is lost and--"
Yes, you know?
It's the transmission of ideas, the brain, to the hand, to the fingers,
and that motor skill you know, to move your hand--
I mean now of course it's mostly wrist movement,
the fact that one is able to you know do sweeping movements like this,
lifting acetate, cutting, you know?
As I said, my de-- like look at my work area.
How many inches is this?
Whereas, when I was doing these mechanicals,
I had to have the whole table clear.
So I could like move up and down, stand up,
stand on something you know, look.
It's the layering and the complexity of these hierarchies right,
that I think is lost now, frankly,
because it is so superficial.
I mean a lot of the machine-- the machine is doing all the work for you.
Of course, you're giving the commands,
which of course I'm not denying
that the artist, the designer is behind all this
and it's generating the actions,
but isn't it great if your body is actually the one doing it?
Being able to directly manipulate type, photography, color,
and to be able to see it in real time as you are working,
that's what it's all about.
That's the revolution.
So it's not just about speed to crank things out.
It's like a speed that
more closely matches your own thought process,
your own ability to come up with ideas.
It has been a tremendous success story in the last decades.
Everybody designs now, which is great.
It's like you know, not everybody could write hundreds of years ago.
Now everybody can write.
All kinds of stupid things will be written,
so all kinds of stupid designs in bundles
and you know ever getting more.
But they are still quality design done by real good people
just as there's quality writing right now by real good people.
It's much harder to find it now.
It used to be that when you looked at some design,
it was already okay, because you had to be a specialist.
Now you don't have to be a specialist,
so you have to really look for something good,
which sometimes it's hard.
When the Industrial Revolution had hit its peak,
it gave birth to the Arts and Crafts Movement
and I think any new technology is always gonna have reactionaries
and it's gonna have experimenters
and it's kind of wonderful to see both things come together.
Sometimes it comes out as pastiche
and sometimes it's a real distinctive shift in the paradigms.
Let me put it this way.
Every time technology takes a big step forward,
I take a big step backward.
It's like I'm almost down to potato stamps now.
The technology's gotten so good.
Why would anybody hire me when you can do it yourself?
The amazing thing is this is the studio.
That's it, you know?
It sounds blasÃ©, but that's the way digital technology has gone,
means that the studio is wherever my laptop is.
In the digital age, there's a lot more end stuff.
You do a sketch, they'll change it.
You do your-- what you think is a final, and then they'll say,
"Well, what if we did this?
What if we did this color?"
For instance you know, if you look at that piece,
which is a combination of airbrush, silk-screening, and it was big.
It was-- you know that piece was this big I think.
When that was done, it was done.
There is no-- there is like,
"Well, what if the horse is white?" you know?
Or "What if the horse is black?" or "What if Clint's shirt was red?"
I mean that didn't happen.
It happens now.
That's part of what we are.
I think the whole question of speed is really interesting.
I think there's a good side to it, which is that we can work quickly,
and more efficiently, and why shouldn't we have things you know,
when we need them and faster than they used to be.
The problem comes when the clients come into this equation,
because clients think, "Aha, this can be done overnight.
Well, this can be done-- I can ask for something
and it can be back to me the same day."
So I think that's created sort of culture of sort of panic and endless deadlines,
and that's not good,
because if you eliminate all thinking time,
design really, really suffers.
There is a tendency now for the client to want to see the finished thing
before you've started it,
because that veneer of sophistication,
that veneer of quality is so seductive that the client just thinks,
"Well, that's easy to do that, isn't it?
Just do it!"
A piece of software, I guess necessarily will have to start
with some kind of default.
Pick up the text you'll have to start with some kind of size, some kind of font,
something.
But it implies in this very quiet way that there is some kind of center
and any choices you make after that is some step away
from some kind of mythical ultimate neutrality or something,
whatever.
And if you walk into a letter press shop, there is no center to that universe.
And I think that's I don't know more realistic way to think about it.
Took a long time for the digital technology transition
to take over the publishing industry and the graphic arts industry.
It's just the way transitions happen, industries.
Horses went by the wayside,
high-end graphic arts system went by the wayside,
and now everybody's empowered.
The art of computer graphics is only in its infancy,
yet it is already stimulating creative thought in far-out areas.
It offers not only the means to quicken the pace of discovery,
but an ideal way of communicating what we may discover.
We want to see hierarchy, we want to see organization,
we want to see complexity,
and we wanna be led through complexity in a good way.
But I don't think that'll ever change.
It's just how it's done differently now.
It's just different tools.