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UCDA Members Remember the 80s

It was a glorious time to be alive, if you survived it. At the beginning of the decade, we saw the last of the venerable Merganthaler Linotype, and were now doing “paste up” with type galleys coming from computer typesetting machines such as Compugraphic. Rubylith was our friend, along with non-repro blue pencils and waxers to tack down type on mechanical boards. In 1984, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh during a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl. The Mac revolution had begun. Within 5 years, every typography, color/prepress house had gone out of business. The funny little machines that looked more like beige bread boxes with a 4 x 5 inch screen was the “must have” for any serious middle class house hold. Its primary function? Desktop publishing for everyone! Now every document would have a rounded corner border!

It still would be twenty years before System X rescued us from the continual reboots when our computer froze. Printers still had no idea how to handle a digital file. Photoshop had not been born. Freehand, not Illustrator was the vector program of choice. QuarkXPress, not InDesign was the big dog on the block. Digital printing? Email? Are you kidding me?

And so, be forgiving if you see a few pieces with day-glo lime, or traps did not line up. The type might look like it was done with rub-on lettering, because it probably was. Benday oval dots were probably bigger then and slightly out of registration. Type may not have been crisp because it was shot through a process camera.

Change was coming. It wasn’t necessarily pretty. But it would be better.

—Randy Clark

Way, way back in the very early 80s I asked my boss if I could sell my ARC stat camera and use the money to buy one of those new Apple computers I’d read about and PageMaker. She said okay if I really thought it would work, so I sold it to a local Kwik Copy, threw in my waxer and even a proportion wheel. Went out and bought a Mac with 4MB storage and pumped that baby up to 512k RAM and never looked back. The local Mac dealer would bring clients to my office to show you really could produce high end publications on the new machines.

Oh yeah, the Compugraphic 7500 typesetter was too heavy and large to get out easily so facilities just threw it down the steps and hauled off the pieces...one of the best days of my life.

—Don Ameye

I still remember the IIci, I think it had a 4 meg drive, can that be?! Oh, it was sah-weet! No more rubber cementing galley after galley of type from our Itek 2400 typesetter for union contract books. Every time it would go out for proofing, it would come back with tons of edits. I’d be slicing out paragraphs and moving up text page after page or cutting words out of lines, moving lines inward, cutting in apostrophes. I’d say, “Nobody move... I just dropped an ‘e’ on the floor... oh here it is, on my sweater!” Though it took some getting used to, that computer saved my sanity for those projects. But I did like the old darkroom stat camera and the creative time to produce thoughtful works. I miss some of that process.

—Marylou Conley

At the time, I was a freelance designer in the Nashville market, doing manual pasteup on artboards with overlays and ordering type from a typehouse, blind coding PC word processing text for a CCI 400 front end (delivering a 360K magnetic disc for output). The market and my clients forced me to go Mac, and so I borrowed money from a relative and ordered a Centris 650 with a 230MB hard drive and 24MB of RAM. When it arrived on my desk, I realized I knew nothing about it and still had to acquire software. I looked at my then-spouse and said, “Look, honey, a $3,000 paperweight...”

A week later, I’d loaded it with Quark and Illustrator and learned basics from an agency designer I’d bribed with the promise of beer and barbecue sandwiches. I delivered my first Mac files of a book cover to a customer a week later.

Eventually, I bought a Syquest 88MB removable hard drive and built a library of 10 disks for storage. When I filled up eight of them with managed and compressed files, I took them all to a service bureau where they would charge me $75 to burn the files to a CD for my archive.

—Ken Morris