Hands Job

Originally published April 2012

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 often 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 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, and take a look at Peter Saville’s colour mark-up for the sleeve of Power, Corruption & Lies — with their overlays and handwritten instructions they look positively artisanal now. These days I just upload a digital file to the printer 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)