For better or worse?

Jack of all trades...

In today’s clinical ‘Mac’ studio environments all the design disciplines of old fall to the fingertips of one person –‘the designer’ or ‘Mac operator’. 

www.creativeline.co.uk is no exception.

But it wasn’t that long ago that it took to 6 or more talented professionals and a lot more time to produce the same job.

A typical project now would involve a designer sitting at his/her Mac and producing a series of design ideas, maybe searching the internet and downloading relevant images, scanning the thousands of fonts on his/her hard drive to find the most suitable, copy and paste in text from clients’ Word document and perhaps retouching some of the pictures.The end result – a perfectly finished design job, which is also the print ready artwork, produced in just a few hours. Pdf and email then puts it front of the client in minutes.

...or master of oneWell lets spare a thought for all the talented guys who, not much more than 15 years ago, had rewarding and fulfilling jobs but are now redundant – all thanks to the mighty Mac (PC).

A typical design project undertaken in the nineties would first go to a designer/visualiser (not always the same person). He/she would not only have the creative juices flowing through his/her veins but also the talent to put these ideas onto paper using pens, pencils, magic markers etc. These visuals would often take hours, pictures had to be hand drawn and headlines had to be traced. These were one offs. If the client wanted to see variations it would often mean starting again.

Once approved the job would then pass to the ‘typographer’. Armed with the visual and a hard copy of the text his/her job would be to count up the characters in the document and, using mathematical equations and cast-off tables, work out what size and type styles would fit to the design. No mean task for a 48 page brochure.

This type mark-up would then be sent to the typesetter, usually via motorbike messenger (another dying job thanks to PCs and email). The typesetter would follow the typographers’ instructions and return either ‘galley’ setting or setting to layout (this came later) about 24 hours later. If the typographer got it wrong the text would be too long or short and he would have to make adjustments to his calculations and send it back to the typesetter for resetting. This would be very expensive and time consuming mistake.

Meanwhile the project co-ordinator would be organising any photography or illustrations that would be needed. Quite often the photographs would need to be retouched which was a highly skilled job involving the making of large duplicate transparencies and merging them together then retouching them with photographic dies. If library shots were to be used this entailed a call to the stock library with a brief for them to find a selection of transparencies to choose from or a visit to the library yourself to search through. Shots would typically cost around £300 for A4 usage in print. Illustrations would be commissioned much as they still are today, however, they skill of the ‘airbrush artist’ has now been made redundant.

So, eventually the typesetting, photographs and illustrations would be ready to go to the finished artist (also know as keyline artist or artworker). His/her job would be to draw up the artwork onto CS10 board, using Rotring pens for the keylines and crop marks and ruling pens for any broad rules. He/she would then paste up all the text onto the board.The pictures would then be traced with a camera safe blue pen and pasted into position. Boards would usually be drawn up in ‘spreads-to-view’ so a 48 page brochure would result in 24 A3+ boards. But these were not yet finished. The next stage for the finished artist was to put a colour mark-up overlay on the boards and meticulously indicate where colours needed to be applied at the next stage in the process. The boards would then be given a further protective overlay.

Next the boards would be photocopied and sent to the client for checking. Any changes would normally require resetting and re-paste up.
The boards would then be sent for “repro’ where they would be photographed and colour separated. The pictures would be scanned and colour separated films would be produced. These would then be cut into the films produced from the artworks colour by colour. This was a very precise process carried out by hand on light-tables. These films would then be used to make colour proofs and if accepted the final printing plates.

ConclusionSo one guy sat at a Mac is now expected to do the job of designer, typographer, typestter, finished artist, photo-retoucher and the reprographics. But is not his/her fault that all these people will now find themselves jobless, it is evolution.

Ask yourself this question – is the designer getting paid the equivalent of 6 salaries – I don’t think so!