 If you find yourself nostalgic for the pre-digital world of creative, you’ve got a screw loose
You don’t have to be terribly old to have witnessed a technological revolution in the creative side of marketing and advertising. We go back farther than most; as we’d noted in an earlier blog post, we actually started our work at a printing press… which was manufactured in 1896. Forget the late 19th century. The late 20th century witnessed an upheaval in creative tech, and with one small exception—which we’ll get to shortly—most of what’s left behind should well remain there. Paste-up We started in the newspaper biz, and then went to an ad agency after that, but still wearing the same hat: Paste-Up Artist. What the heck is that? Before desktop publishing (the revolution by which you can lay out artwork on a computer screen), the layout was quite literally “laid out”… on paper. And then it would be photographed in order to make printing plates. The “photography” was of the high-contrast sort, so it could forgive a multitude of errors on the paper below, and was conspicuously blind to certain colors—light blue, in particular. So it would go like this: You’d have a sketch (a layout) of what, say, a print ad should look like. The copy would get written and typeset, emerging as little pieces of paper with the type on them, via yet another photographic/chemical process, whereby the individual letters were projected through a kind of stencil onto light-sensitive paper and then developed. Photos were done in much the same way, although they were “screened,” that is, placed under a glass grid that would divide the resulting image into various-sized “halftone dots” which, from a distance, appear to be smooth shades of gray. Halftone printing is still used today, but the old-school “stat cameras” have long been retired. Anyway, all of these elements would need to be assembled, on paper, to match the look of the original layout sketch. Hence “paste-up.” The individual elements would literally be cut out, either with scissors or a razor knife, and then “pasted” to the heavier paper which would hold them. Actual paste wasn’t used. Hot wax was. One of our first tasks in advertising was “refilling the waxer,” which equated to loading little blocks of sticky paraffin into an electric device that would heat them to liquid. (Here’s a great photo of one in action.) When you inserted a piece of artwork into the gadget, a motorized roller would pass the underside of the art across the surface of melted wax, rendering it sticky. Thus you could “paste” it to your art board; you could also re-position it easily, if needed, with your fingers. And you’d need to, a lot. You can safely assume, today, that your lines of type will be straight and parallel. Not then! You needed a T-square to check alignment. And you kept a special “non-repro pencil,” which drew in that magic shade of light blue, to mark out areas you wanted to keep track of, but not to show up in the finished product. By the way, we had a trick for centering elements such as headlines. We’d draw a vertical guideline (in non-photo blue) down the center of the art board. And then, rather than measure that headline and divide by two, we’d simply fold the thing in half and make a mark where the fold was. We’d line up the fold line with the penciled center line, saving us at least the labor of doing math. You have no idea how gratifying it was, not long thereafter, to simply type Command-Shift-C. Boy did it ever suck Needless to say, all of this was a laborious and thankless process. The resulting piece was also terribly fragile: Bend it or drop it, and parts could move or fall off. There was no electronic transmission. If you wanted an ad to appear in a newspaper in another state, you had to FedEx the artwork there. And working with hot waxers, caustic developer chemicals, and X-acto blades added delightful hazards of their own. If you haven’t noticed by now, we don’t miss those days. What, then, endures? What technology from those pre-digital days, is as good as ever, and arguably better than the computerized tech which supposedly replaced it? Which old-school device did we use then, that we still use now, and you can, and should, if you don’t already? The ageless wonder For us, it’s the pencil. Nothing is so fast and immediate. Sure, there are tablets and styli, but even the best struggle to imitate the tactile feedback of friction as graphite transfers to paper and the point changes shape as it goes; worse, even the fastest computer chips still evince a perceptibly annoying lag. It interferes. It gums up the gears of creativity. There’s still room for the pencil in your work today. There sure is in ours; just the other day, we sketched a quick layout for a client with a speed and immediacy that are impossible with computer tech. And since the resulting image looks rough and hand-drawn, there’s no accidentally mistaking it for a finished layout—a common problem when “roughing a layout” via computer. Of course, we popped that sketch into a scanner, and emailed the scan to our client, hundreds of miles away. And at their end, their designer may well import the scan into his software, and place it on a bottom layer that he can toggle on or off at will as he builds tighter elements above it—a wonderful tech-enabled convenience. The point is this: Technology for technology’s sake is worthless. It’s only good if it’s an enabler. If it saves you time and effort, and offers up new creative opportunities. When someone invents something that out-pencils the pencil, we’ll take it without the drag of nostalgia. But that day hasn’t come just yet. Need help with your next creative assignment? Give us a shout. We’d love to put our experience, and our high/low-tech approach, to work for you.
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