Artifacts From The Past

While excavating an ancient burial ground (read closet) the other day, I inadvertently unearthed what appears to be a many centuries old treasure trove of artifacts from another time. Relics of tools from the Pre-Computer Age, (which comes just after the Neolithic, or New Stone Age). Unlike the Paleolithic, when more than one human species existed, only one human species (Homo pasteupius) reached the Pre-Computer Age.

Tools were all hand-held then, and amazingly crude, forcing the users to work at a larger size than the finished product. When finished the final artwork would be reduced, thereby creating more of a polished image. Above, this is what they called a "Reducing Glass," the opposite to the magnifying glass, which allowed the graphic artist of old to view his work at a smaller size while working; thus perceiving their work at the size it would be published.

While mathematics may not have been among the designer's strengths, this quaint disc allowed the user to align the original measure of a piece along the outside wheel with the desired length on the inside wheel and magically the percentage needed to move the piece from one measure to another would be revealed in the window. Pieces were commonly worked on at 125% so dialing in this percentage in the magic window would allow the designer to look along the measurements on the wheels to find the working sizes for all components of the artwork. Crude and time consuming but less so than doing the math in one's head. Which could have been dangerous.

Here we see a container for a roll of registration marks. Long before layers in Adobe Creative Suite existed, artwork was prepared on thick white boards. Spot colors were indicated by using hand-cut shapes on labeled acetate overlays (using rubi or amberlith). In order for printers to align the overlays properly, these registration marks were applied to all surfaces, one on top of each other. The production tradespeople simply lined up the registration marks by eye (at least three outside of the artwork crop marks) to position the spot colors amazingly accurately.

These are but three examples of the ancient tools used back in another time and place. When drafting tables, steel rulers, parallel rules, set squares, X-Acto knives and Rapidograph pens were the instruments of great (and not-so-great) designers.

Of course I'm much too young to remember these times...

Join us next week when we further examine a world miraculously without modern computers scanners and photoshop. When large room-sized "copy cameras" shot artwork in the dark. When halftone screens were actual screens placed between camera lenses and photosensitive PMT paper to convert consistent tones into dots at different resolutions. A world in which plastic bezel templates and french curves were used to manually guide pens to create smooth lines in an age without vector art. Where "FPO" meant "for position only" and "FL, RR and RL" were instructions to typesetters and things were stuck to things with a thin layer of melted wax.

An ancient, amazing age before modern conveniences...