Saturday 24 September 2016

The Lazy Dog


I have spent the last couple of days organising the publicity for H.I.'s forthcoming exhibition. Three years spent as a layout artist for a printing company in the early 1970s should have put me in good stead, but - instead - I have got the weakest of grips on the technology used in modern layout and graphics, so all of my artwork harks back to the days when cut and paste meant exactly that.

I used dark rooms and bromide prints, golfball IBM typesetters, razor blades and Letraset - remember Letraset?! You were always left with a load of letters on the sheet, forcing you to buy a load more expensive new sheets so you could actually spell out the name of the company advertising. You would also be left with many little pictorial, architectural scenes featuring stick-people wandering around newly built shopping centres amongst stick trees. They were the equivalent of emoticons, I think, and even lazy architects didn't use them.

Black lines of varying thicknesses were made using Rotring pens. A complete set of Rotring cost a lot of money - about a week's wages - and they were extremely high maintenance. If you didn't take them completely apart and wash them at the end of the day, they were unusable by the following day. These days, you choose a line from your computer's selection, decide on a start and end point, click a button and there it is.

I have 40-something year-old friends who are graphic artists, and I could never compete with the razzle that they produce. Consequently, my artwork has an old-world charm which they sneer at, but elderly people think is quite competent.

I designed and built H.I.'s website some years ago (it desperately needs updating, but I have almost forgotten how to do it) and, at the time, I was pretty pleased with it. Her grandson looks at it and thinks it is hopelessly out of fashion now, but I think it has an air of calm and tranquility which I would be loathe to ruin with flashing images and self-scrolling slide-shows - just because I can.

Some things, however, never change. There was one typeface which I favoured above the others so much, that I overused it horribly, and bought about 5 times more Letraset sheets than my predecessor so I could. It is called 'Optima'.

I am still overusing it to this day, forty years later, and it is the typeface which is H.I.'s hallmark. It forms both our letterheads, is used in all publicity - it is even used on our doorbell. Old dogs, new tricks, eh?

19 comments:

  1. I still use a kind of Letraset and stencils and felt tip pens for all lettering and old typewriters. Like you I know little or nothing about computer graphics and the only program I ever had came free on a Sony Vaio laptop and I never got to grips with it although did achieve a few a pieces of text work using it. Doing lettering with the stencils and letraset seems a lot more personal than computer graphics.

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    1. Much more personal. It's difficult to split the letter on the screen.

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    2. Having said that, I bet you split your Rs on a regular basis.

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  2. Ah, the good old days of cutting and pasting and rubber cement -- I remember them well! But Letraset I never heard of til now...

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    1. We called it Cow Gum. I don't know why, or how.

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  3. Nothing wrong with a bit of ' Old School ' .... just call it ' retro ' and everyone will love it !!
    I still have a few sheets of Letraset from the 70's {?} .... I don't think they scrape off very well now !! XXXX

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    1. But you still brush-up nicely, and that's what counts.

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  4. I could never get Letraset to line-up properly, so used Calligraphy instead. Real 'Old School'.

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  5. I have a friend who was a graphic designer, back in the day. When he couldn't get by with cut and paste, he moved on to being a marketing consultant. Now he is semi-retired, in Mexico, and fancies himself a writer.

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    1. That could have been a Southern Hemispherical me.

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  6. I'd forgotten about Letraset!
    For our heritage exhibitions I usually paint the headings, using a chisel brush.

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  7. Fun to go down this graphics memory lane. Although I never did any graphic design myself, many of my friends certainly depended on the skills you've described.

    Perhaps Rapidiograph pens were/are similar to Rotrings? I've still probably got a few dried up Rapidiograph pens around here somewhere, from back when I used them, and even dip staff pens, to do ink drawings. Cross hatching and all that was what initially got me interested in etching.

    Long ago.

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    1. I don't know Rapidiograph, but they sound the same sort of things. When I went to school, we had desks with inkwells and dip-pens as standard!

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    2. The primary school at which I began my education had those same old desks. However, we first and second graders were not yet introduced to ink pens.

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  8. I like to google everything. Now I know that 'Optima' was invented by one Hermann Zapf.

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    1. Well I didn't know that. He sounds like an electrician.

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