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Posted by Cassius
May 22, 2011 at 06:28 PM
Does anyone remember “cut and paste”?
Posted by MenAgerie
May 22, 2011 at 06:51 PM
Ha! I was trained as a graphic designer and illustrator between 1975-79, and the college was very proud of the photo-typesetting equipment it had. We had filing cabinets full of files of fonts that we had to rifle through to choose from, then photograph the letters, and cut and pate then in lines to form the artwork - to be photographed again and transferred to a lithographic press.
What a palaver… now it is just a couple of clicks of a mouse in Quark Express and its all done. I did a bit of sign-writing when i got out of college then a couple of years later Murdock destroyed the British print Unions and everything was computerised.
I had never even seen a computer, let alone worked one - so I was as redundant as a skilled craftsman could be!
Cut and paste, fiddly scalpels and the smell of cow gum - ah, I don’t miss it a bit.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 22, 2011 at 07:46 PM
In my first job in marketing, I was a copywriter for the bicycle manufacturer Cannondale. I didn’t do any graphic design, but I was enlisted to be one of the small marketing department staff who learned to use the brand new Itek Quadritek phototypesetting machine. What a beast—although it was far more efficient than sending the type out to be set. It really is amazing how much the personal computer (although the Itek machine was a computer) has changed the way we do things.
MenAgerie wrote:
>Ha! I was trained as a graphic designer and illustrator between 1975-79, and the
>college was very proud of the photo-typesetting equipment it had. We had filing
>cabinets full of files of fonts that we had to rifle through to choose from, then
>photograph the letters, and cut and pate then in lines to form the artwork - to be
>photographed again and transferred to a lithographic press.
>What a palaver… now
>it is just a couple of clicks of a mouse in Quark Express and its all done. I did a bit of
>sign-writing when i got out of college then a couple of years later Murdock destroyed
>the British print Unions and everything was computerised.
>I had never even seen a
>computer, let alone worked one - so I was as redundant as a skilled craftsman could
>be!
>Cut and paste, fiddly scalpels and the smell of cow gum - ah, I don’t miss it a bit.
Posted by Graham Rhind
May 23, 2011 at 08:50 AM
It must seem rather weird that some of us old fuddy duddies prefer old-fashioned writing implements, but there’s a little method in our madness.
I don’t use outliners (possibly the only person on this forum who doesn’t!) - I usually can’t get the framework that I have in my head out without messing up the one I have in my head, and if I do manage it, I then ignore the outline and write as I would have done anyway. My writing has always evolved. At university I wrote essays first by pen and then re-wrote them on a typewriter (the only computer we had then required punch cards ...). Although the implements I use now are different, the pattern is the same. Writing and rewriting a work gives me better results than trying to plan it first.
Apart from the tactile satisfaction of using pens and typewriters, I don’t like reading from a computer screen, so having a version on paper works better for me. That said, I am preparing my new book in WritingOutliner for Word. I don’t have to learn any new software, I can add footnotes, endnotes and graphics as I go, and it produces an output format my publishers like. Already being known and published I’m possibly given more leeway on such matters than most :-)
Graham