Cow Gum, scalpel and a set square and a mountain of CS10 paste board! Those were the tools of our trade when I first ventured into the world of advertising and design. Jump to the present day and it’s Powermacs, keyboard and mouse and a mountain of work on a CD or memory stick! Technology has jumped in leaps and bounds but the end product is still the same. We still aim for the perfect print. Although the time to turn a job around is a fraction of what it used to be as we have far more powerful tools to hand. Illustrations can be done in a flick of the cursor, photos enhanced and retouched by the touch of the magic wand. What used to take weeks to turn around, now takes a few hours or even minutes. Has this affected the quality of work?
The days of applying the sticky stuff to the back of a sheet of type, fresh from the typesetters and pasting it onto the board and painfully getting it to line up with something, anything! If the text needed amending and you had time to send it back to the typehouse, great. If not, a scalpel and a steady pair of hands were needed to cut each word or character and feed it along bit by bit to make the amends, and that’s before the Cow Gum dried up! If that was the case then you had to douse the text with lighter fuel (no not set it alight!) to soften the glue. The gum rolled off the back once dried and collected into a ball, used to make a great weapon. You often had these disgusting looking missiles fly across the studio, bouncing off the walls, German designed desks or most often your colleague’s head! This may sound undisciplined and chaotic but from all of this emerged some great work. A combination of work hard, play hard!
Who can forget the wonderful smell of Magic Markers! Enough to keep a smile on your face all day! Everybody looked forward to Magic Marker layouts and the wonderful effects created by splattering it with lighter fuel to create a unique piece of work! Although now a days we try to create the effect digitally but where’s the Magic Marker smell to keep you smiling?
Have you any thoughts or views?
Surinder Kumar
Studio Manager
Surinder, love your posting! Arrr them days were good, and I still get my marker 'fix' now and again doing marker presentations for agencies.
ReplyDeleteAt first I thought that you had changed the Three's logo to the hand rendered feel at the head of the blog, but I clicked on the 3's web site and the old one was there - I vote for this hand rendered one (have a word in Lindsays shell like!)
Keep up the good work chap.
Paul W
not forgetting those sheets of letraset with the 1950's people in various poses...
ReplyDeletegod surinder u just threw me back 21 yrs!!! i havent heard the words cow gum, magic markers (& yes i remember the "wonderful" smell!!!! ha ha). I can also remember cutting out words and letters, what a skill gone 4eva!!! i still got my scalpel somewhere!!!!!
ReplyDelete