Remember

Remember t-squares and triangles? How about an eraser shield? When was the last time you smelled rubber cement? Years ago I began cutting and pasting type and line art with an X-Acto knife and hot wax on a drawing board. It was my first job out of college (not including that month at the 7-Eleven working the graveyard shift). The position was called “paste up artist”…a job title I would not be surprised to learn may no longer exist. My skills have evolved over these past 25 years to include working with software by Autodesk called AutoCAD, and two by Adobe called Photoshop and Pagemaker; software packages that routinely do what was once flat out impossible. Of course this comes as no surprise to anyone who’s even remotely aware of modern computer technology, but it does yield an interesting perspective on what we artists, designers and engineeres once did before America went digital.

Back in the’70’s it took five of us working ‘til 7pm, five days per week, to produce two ads, two pages each, for the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday and Wednesday food sections while I was working for the Food Fair/Pantry Pride grocery store chain. I would guess that I could now do all this work myself in a single day with Pagemaker and my scanner. That is reducing 250 personhours to eight. Oh by the way…it would come out better now as well! No “cut marks” around that line art picture of the paper bag tipping over and spilling out the southern yams at .59/pound. And immeasurably more freedom and flexibility when it comes to aesthetic decisions. That last minute price change because Murray the produce buyer found out that Acme, excuse me, The Acme, was going to advertise Porter House steak at 3.99/pound was a mega-hassle. Run to the VariTyper machine (since extinct) in the dark room (nearly extinct, save for high end professional photographers) to slosh through gallons of nostril burning, skin discoloring chemicals to produce a strip of film with a single line of copy on it (“USDA Choice Porter House…$3.89/pound!”), then back to the drawing board, literally. Today such a change would take less time than it’s taking me to type this sentence. But then I’d have no brain cell destroying fumes to blame for my forgetting to pick up the cat food after yesterday’s networking meeting (sorry honey!).

In the mood for a misnomer? That T-square was indeed shaped like a “T” but it was about as square as a snowman carrying a pumpkin. I never met one that stayed square. Eyeballing the pasted up type was more accurate. No longer. Pagemaker can make adjustments to within 1/100 of an inch. Impressive? Quite. Until you compare it to AutoCAD, which can measure to 1/10,000,000 of an inch without breathing hard.

Chart-Pak Tape! It’s still around, but I can’t think of why I’d need it. We used to roll this skinny black tape onto our velox (say “veal locks”) boards whenever we needed a straight black line. And if a curve was called for, you had to break out the French curve and Rapid-O-Graph pen. You had one shot. Louse it up and you likely had to start the ad over. Now all kinds of software will make any kind of line you want, any shape, any length, any width, any color, anything. Did I mention those old Rapid-O-Graphs clogged constantly and were a guaranteed leak waiting to happen? No amount of erasing, even with my trusty kneaded eraser, could overcome those Rapid-O-Graph splotches. I still have a kneaded eraser. I need it. For nostalgia.

Wax was a miracle. Before waxers, either hand held or the wide tabletop models, we had to use rubber cement. Unless you were really quick and super dexterous, you had only one chance to put that piece of type in the right position before the glue dried. The waxer seemed like a godsend. You could actually lift up what was already pasted down, move it and re-paste it. All it took was cutting out the type, running it through the waxer, mounting it on the tip of your X-Acto blade, positioning it and burnishing it down. We had things called burnishers, but I found the back of a tablespoon worked much better. All this came with that waxy aroma pervading the room. And the occasional burned finger from squeezing the raw wax cubes into the waxer. It only took the thing about 45 minutes to warm up each morning before the wax melted sufficiently. This was Utopia.

I sat in a four legged (good for tipping over) drafting stool that was a monster to get any adjustment out of. To change its height you had to kneel on the floor, hold it’s column and spin the seat around. To make the back more comfortable you had to go find a more comfortable chair. Modern office chairs are ergonomic wonders. Comfy. Super adjustable. Some of them have more bells and whistles than a fire truck.

We used White Out, wooden rulers and thumbtacks. And a typewriter. And someone had two tin cans with a string stretched between them. And smoke signals. Then someone invented the wheel…

Ernest Valtri owns Object Design, Incorporated, an Industrial Design firm in Doylestown. Object Design is able to produce standard engineering drawings for nearly any application and also provide design improvements for existing products. Creative solutions for new product design and development, typically incorporating 3D modeling techniques, are ODI’s strength. Additional industrial design services include package design, furniture design, patent drawing documentation, stereolithography, tooling design and human factors studies. Smoke signals are being phased out.