Tools of the Trade
Tools of the Trade
Aug 16, 2010
Before the advent of design and illustration software, rendering layouts was very much a manual process. There were all sorts of wonderful tools to employ: reprographic blue pencils, china markers, black ink, ruling pens and rapidographs, s-curves, t-squares and triangles, drafting templates, x-acto knives, metal straight-edges and calipers, rubylith, rubber cement, kneaded erasers, type gauges, proportion wheels, and loupes, transfer lettering and burnishers, waxers and brayers. Drafting tables, luxo lamps, and light boxes were de rigueur for graphic arts professionals.
Type came in three varieties: transfer lettering, typeset galleys, or hand lettering. Straight lines were made either with ink and ruling pens or rapidographs, or, were carefully laid down with adhesive-backed ruling tape. Images were either line art or halftones, manipulated using a copy camera. If you wanted to resize an image, you sent out for a stat (short for photostat). Putting all the pieces together was called paste-up. Typeset galleys, supplied by another person called a typesetter, were pasted onto layout boards using a thinly-applied layer of hot wax. Precision was achieved using t-squares and triangles, or parallel rules. Placeholders for photographic images were called knock-outs, made by meticulously cutting into rubylith, a translucent layer of colored emulsion on an acetate sheet. You demonstrated skill by whether or not the acetate bore any imprint of the x-acto blade. When a final layout was delivered to the printer (the person, not the object), it was called a mechanical. This comprised layers of illustration board, ink, adhesives, photosensitive papers, acetate, and tracing vellum. These physical materials and the manual process employing them have now become metaphors for what is accomplished using software. Skills change to suit the tools.
The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies is a web site exhibiting images of graphic tools and materials. People can submit images to the collection. It’s a virtual stroll down memory lane for 40-to-60-something graphic arts geeks. It’s been 30 years since I’ve used rubber cement, and I can still conjure up the smell.
© Sue Niewiarowski