We’d size pictures manually, then attach them to the artwork (a box was drawn to give the printers a ‘keyline’ to place the image in) ready for sending to film.
Then along came Digital Research’s GUI, or graphical user interface, GEM and with it Ventura Publisher, a black and white piece of software that let you ‘lay out’ pages onscreen. I had a chat to Phil about the new software and how he had to invest in it so that he could run my pages.
‘Rubbish! That’ll never take off! You can’t match the quality of compositors’ work, proper typesetting, with that amateur junk!’ said Phil. 'My Linotronics cost £30,000 a piece - nobody can compete with stuff like that!'
Within the year he had gone bust and I had taken all my business to David, who I didn’t really like very much but who would ‘run out’ my pages from Ventura as one single layout, all ready for the printers once I’d just taped the pictures to copies of the proofs. I didn’t need a graphic artist anymore, either - I did my own layouts onscreen. They might not always have followed the rules of typography as they existed in Caxton’s day, but then we were redefining what you could do with type anyway – for a few halcyon years, drop caps and huge lettering ruled magazine layouts all over the UK.
Ever since then, I have heard people talking about quality as the reason why technology, the Internet in particular, won’t disintermediate them. But the amazing fact is that we don’t actually care about quality. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are some of the crappiest pieces of filming. I play my music in my car, ripped from my ultra-high quality CDs and converted to lo-fi MP3s, using an iTrip radio transmitter thingy. The quality of what I am listening to is probably less than that of a Chrome cassette.
When technology improves access, quality becomes secondary. And quality is the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated.
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5 comments:
OMG I remember Ventura! I specifically recall the excitement that you could do *whatever* you wanted, even proper headers and footers, and the ultimate, odd and even pages could have different layouts.
Good post.
Oh dear, I too remember galley proofs and spraymount and the joys of real typography. Bob Randall, I salute you!
But surely there is a distinction between the medium and the quality of the information it transmits - the YouTube videos may be filmed in wobblycam, but the moment is sensational. And I'll bet you're listening to The Stranglers!
EoD
Type mark-ups, metal type, proof-reading, stereo foundries...those were the days!
Ahhhhh spray mount in your hair and juniors sniffing Clean Art in the store cupboard :-)
Them were the days!!
I also remember the days doing sound editing with rolls of tape, a blade and a chinagraph pen.
God I'm old!
Sigh - the smell of spraymount - the endless hours spent laying out my college newspapers and yearbook - the photos being printed through black dot screens - the crazy things that a group of people high on spraymount will do when they are the only people in the school grounds at 2am. What fun!
Susan - I think we're about the same age....
You're right about a drop in quality, Alex.
For me, it started in the wedding and portrait professional photography industry.
When film was still around, we had the pickiest customers who wouldn't accept a photo that we had processed if it was about 2cc (miniscule) difference in colour or density when compared to other images.
When digital photography came in, suddenly they were printing their own and accepting a far lesser quality image than they would EVER accept from us.
It's now a case of "it's good enough" over "it has to be perfect".
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