Typesetting & Paste-up, 1970

The first time I did any layout design was in 1987. I began working after hours at the Regis High School Owl Newspaper in New York. Producing a publication was quite different back then: we'd use an old mac to print out articles, hot wax them onto a board, and figure out scaling and cropping of photos with a proportional scale. If a line or word of type had to be changed, we'd print it up, cut out a sliver of paper, and carefully glue it onto the article. We had a Linotype (?) Headline setting machine, which was basically a large P-Touch that used large plastic discs with all a font's characters embossed around its edge. You would turn the disc to select each letter, much like cracking a safe. Despite our manager's cries of "Be careful, that stuff's expensive!", we couldn't help but use them as frisbees. We had x-acto knives - and a ceiling of foam panels, which made great targets. That was the first time I saw Rapid-o-graph pens, which I use today. Which brings me to today's link: a nice set of photos showing how layout was done in 1970. Although these techniques may seem like ancient history, the same basic concepts are there, from 1970's paste-up, to the desktop publishing of 1987, to 2005 and the blog publishing explosion.




Typesetting & Paste-up photos