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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 René 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 535° 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 blasé, 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.