I was going through some old work the other day when I found this photo taken around 1990 at a design consultancy I used to work at in London. I’m the chap centre-right in the white t-shirt beavering away at his desk. My hairstyle isn’t all that different now but almost everything about my job is unrecognizable since the picture was taken.
You might have noticed that there isn’t a computer on my desk, there isn’t a computer on any of the desks in fact, just piles of paper and books. I’m working on a mock-up of a brochure for a client presentation and I’m doing it by hand using coloured paper, photocopies, and rub-down transfers, all painstakingly cut out and stuck together. Back then I often had a case of what we called “designer’s finger” where the tip of my index finger was slightly flat from being accidentally sliced off by a scalpel. Many’s the time I got drops of blood on a pristine sheet of board I was working on.
A lot of designers were already using computers by the end of the 80s but my boss wasn’t convinced of their worth so we were behind the curve at this point, still doing things the way designers had done them for decades. The only computer in the place was the Word Processor our receptionist used to type letters – I remember how amazed we were by it’s cut-and-paste function and that she didn’t need to use Tipp-Ex to delete a word – but apart from that the most sophisticated technology we had was the fax machine and photocopier.
Computers hit the design business like the meteor that supposedly crashed into the earth and killed all the dinosaurs, they not only wiped out entire professional trades and industries like typesetters and artworkers, but completely changed the way designers did their jobs, making redundant a whole world of touchy-feely and mechanical things that were once tools of the trade: Rotring pens, CS10 board, Magic Markers (the smell!), type gauges, 10A scalpel blades (ouch!), Cow Gum, PMT cameras, Pantone paper, Letraset, Grant projectors, French curves, Chinagraph pencils, and those lovely Staedtler plastic erasers which were like perfect little modernist white bricks.
You know I’m a sentimental fool who gets all romantic about old-timey, analog things but it would be silly of me to pretend that the Mac hasn’t made my job easier in lots of ways. The trade-off though is that I’ve lost a lot of the hand skills I used to have, and moving pixels around a screen doesn’t give one quite the same visceral, hands-on satisfaction of cutting things up and sticking them down, there was a real art and craft to it. This is what the camera-ready artwork you sent to the printer used to looked like, with its overlays and handwritten instructions it looks positively artisanal now. These days I just upload a digital file over the internet, it’s all very clean with no blood shed anywhere — not literal blood anyway.
Download: Human Hands – Elvis Costello & The Attractions (mp3)
cryingallthewaytothechipshop.wordpress.com 
Photography changed just as wildly. I spent the first half of my career doing film runs, filling my fridge with 35mm and 120 rolls when I got home, budgeting my shooting, darkrooming, getting to the colour lab first thing next morning (or couriering film if it was a rush,) doing clip tests, sending them off for client approval (another trip, or courier,) back into the darkroom, putting copyright stamps on prints, slides or transparency sheets, sending along invoices, waiting 90 days and hoping that I’d have enough to make the next film run, if the client didn’t advance me expenses on the shoot, and hoping my labs would wait until I got paid. I always had a “B lab” in the wings in case late payments put me in arrears to the “A lab.”
All gone. Stick in a memory card, shoot till it’s filled, come home, stick it in the reader, bash about with photoshop, send the finished jpgs to the client, or upload directly to their site. My overhead, as a regular cost, has ceased to exist. But so has my A lab and B lab.
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Oh to ink a ligature again…..
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Wow, Lee. It brings it all back to me – we are in the same industry.
I left college in ’87. My first job was at a London design consultancy doing exactly the things you describe in your post. I’d forgotten a lot of it! CS10 card 😀
I ended up in TV Graphics which has also changed a lot – from Quantel to Mac, 4:3 to 16:9, SD to HD etc.
I hope the job search is going well. I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs recently so I can relate to your position.
I love your blog. Keep up the good work.
All best.
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PS Is that a Tizio lamp on the desk nearest the camera? Very of it’s time. Haven’t seen one of them for years!
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My dad is a cartographer and went through the same process. I guess it was even more radical for him cause he’s older than you.
He always talks about missing hand drawing, and I miss all those magic tools that I used to steal from his desk for my childhood drawings LOL
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I did my art college work experience in the same year 1990, and the macs had just arrived the previous month and hit the studio like a bomb, with several designers still resisting using them. Some were still using airbrush style artwork, which seems so dated to me. The ’91 recession hit the next year and the studio closed.
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That is a Tizio lamp Steven, well spotted. We all had one, my boss was well into “designer” things — had a Braun calculator, bought expensive kitchen gadgets from Alessi etc. You might notice the Cinni fan on the left, they were v. popular at the time too.
The ’91 recession cost me my job at that place. Last time I was laid off until the other week.
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Grew up work-wise in magazine publishing, went out with a scalpel/cowgum wielding art editor (scary).
Can well remember whole mag pages being pasted up on boards, then filmed and printed.
Seems almost Medieval now.
That’s a great pic, baggy t-shirt guy.
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my kingdom for a type gauge
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love your blog! found it through the hype machine, but will definitely be returning of my own free will 😛
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I was in the London Graphics Centre last Summer – which was a wonderful exercise in nostalgia – my daughter (who is about to graduate from Art School), couldn’t understand why I was going around looking so wistful…
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The one on Long Acre in Covent Garden? That place still around?
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Yes, full to the brim of memories… it was lovely.
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er..afraid not. The London Graphic Centre on Long Acre moved one street away to Shelton Street about 15 years ago. I used to go to the Long Acre shop (now another clothes shop), because I designed for Ted Baker, who’s shop was located in Langley Court opposite the shop. I used to have to go there for Cow gum (another long lost graphic friend), and backing props for A4 point of sales. Next door was The Covent Garden Trading Co which has been an M&S for about 15 years as well. Ahh happy days….
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I worked in corporate advertising departments since the early 80’s. I think I miss the wax machine the most, which sucked in blocks of Lettraset copy and FPO images and made them sticky enough to place on composed layout boards. Our word processing “department” was in a Wang room, we’d submit typewritten text to them for transcription (thank God for the Macintosh saving us mid-decade).
I am fascinated by the bridging devices popping up between the sunset of one technology and rise of another. They always seem like a great idea at the time. Syquest and Benoulli Drives are an example (between burnable CD’s and low-capacity floppies).
Another was the “slide laserwriter,” which bridged dthe gap between old-fashioned word-photography 35mm slides and Powerpoint. It took 35mm slide film; you’d write the text for your presentation slides in Word or Macwrite and it would burn that text onto the slide film which you got developed, giving us presenters a lot more flexibility to cobble together last-minute slide presentations.
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The amazing thing is not that LGC is one street away, but that it’s open at all… now, where did I put that parallel motion board?
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Omnicrom machines, anyone?
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Oh God, Omnicrom. We had one of those, I’d forgotten what they were called. That got a lot of use.
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There are a couple of blokes in back wearing ties! That really was a long time ago.
I know designers of a certain age are nostalgic about the old days but you rarely see them messing around with cow gum and scalpels in their spare time!
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I think they’d been to see a client, hence the ties. But yes, the 80s were when designers tried to appear more businesslike.
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I used to work at LGC in Long Acre and those were the days allright. Polyboard and Spraymount. We used to sell truckloads of the stuff. If I’m not mistaken is this Sampson Tyrell’s offices?? I used to do deliveries there
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No, it’s The Yellow Pencil Company in Lambeth. We used to be off the Charing Cross Road but had to move because of the rent which was a shame, I really missed working in the West End. We shared the building with an architecture firm called Axis Design.
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