Comment by davebindy
11 years ago
Your comments brought back a lot of memories for me.
I worked as a production artist (someone who takes a designer's idea and turns it into somethng that can actually be produced, hence the name) off and on for 15 years, starting in the early 1970s and ending about 1991. I worked for an ad agency, typesetter, publisher, and finally in the art department of a flexo plate maker. When I first started, we used drafting boards, T-squares, X-acto knives, and rubber cement. Type was of the hot variety - photo type was only for display type, not body copy. In the late 80s I was trained on two SOTA production machines: a DuPont VASTER system (used both vector and raster graphics), and later a Context system that ran on Sun workstations.
The typesetter your parents bought was likely either a Compugraphic or A/M (Adressograph Multigraph) - in the pre-DTP days, they seemed to have most of the market for phototypsetting systems (at least for smaller businesses). I worked with both, and your description would fit either of them.
I guess I would somewhat dispute your assertion that layouts (or paste-ups/mechanicals as they're more properly called) took "forever" or that it was a "very long" process. Using the "Thin and Pretty" layout in the article as an example, the last place I worked we probably would have budgeted an hour for the job - typesetting, mechanical, camera work, and (maybe) printing plates (all done in-house). I don't think that's terribly out of line with the time it would take using DTP. (That doesn't include design time!)
When we were first making the switch from the old manual operation to digital, we often found it took longer to do the work using DTP; it wasn't unusual to hear an artist say "Screw it" and go back to his light table to finish a job. But that was to be expected - unfortunately, a number of my co-workers had little or no computer experience. Over time that ended, although the company did keep two full-time artists on staff who did nearly everything the "old" way until about 2000. The huge advantage of DTP, especially early on, was that changes/additions/corrections were so much easier. And in our case, it was considerably easier to actually find artwork on the computer. All our paste-ups were done on #20 illustration board (for dimensional stability) and they were filed in row after row after row of architectural file cabinets. Unfortunately, no one had ever devised a good filing system, so it would often take 2 or 3 or 4 times as long to find the freakin' art you needed to make a change on as it took to actually make the change...
Thanks for providing some clarification and color to my very hazy brain dump.
I do remember my parent's "climate controlled" filing room and filing system for client artwork and other sundry. It was basically a big storage room filled with racks of old paper shipping boxes and large grey envelopes. The customer order would get written up on triplicate carbon free paper (customer, contact info, type of job, ink, references to artwork, due date etc), one color for the front office, one for the "lookup" catalog (organized by customer name) and one would go on the front of the envelope. All the artwork, disks, negatives, proofs, a few final samples and other assets for the job would go in the envelope and get organized onto a shelf.
Every job generated a new job number that was something like yearmonth-sequential# so a job coming in today might be 201403-38 and jobs folders were roughly organized by the 201403 part.
If a customer came in and said "I want another 10,000 of that job I had you print lat Oct" we'd go to the catalog, lookup their name, find the 201310-# job and go pull it from the shelf to review. It usually took just a few minutes to find something. I think every 7 or 8 years we'd go through and purge old files just because there simply wasn't the physical space.
They'd also use the job # part of the serial, when writing up jobs, to keep a rough estimate on business volume. Since every month the job # started back over at 1, and you knew that you'd on average do 600 jobs a month, you could get a feel if the month was slow or fast just be seeing what the next job id was going to be on a given date.
The job id's were then used in scheduling. For a long time my father drew up the schedules by hand. He had a grid printed up on large format paper, and I remember him coming home every day with a stack of the front office carbon-free copies for the day and drawing up the production schedule on the grid.
I think the hours of the work day were along the top of the grid and the equipment operator was along the side. He used some kind of color coding system (with the full job # and a legend) to trace the job through the work-day as it moved through various pieces of equipment and such, and he'd use some known metrics for how long it'd take to do that kind of job on this or that equipment, and budget it out. There was quite an art to it. Especially for big jobs that spanned multiple days that needed to be kept track of.
It was kind of a Gantt chart, but a little different. And it provided a clear visualization of all the production going on at a glance. He'd make a couple copies and one would go in the production room so any operator could go check it for their next job, or to see if they were on schedule (sometimes they didn't agree and they'd go make their case for a schedule adjustment).
Sometime in the late 90s he finally got a computer and reproduced the entire thing in Excel, which meant he could do all the scheduling at work instead of at home. When they finally sold their company, the new owners were impressed enough with the system that I think they adopted it for their business.