Graphic Designers, not Magicians

A photo! Oh jeezus, fair enough!!



Web designers get their fair share of 'mission impossible' too. Usually 'I want to be front page of Google... NOW!' oh, and they don't want to pay for it either.

In fact I did a site some time ago for a Bed & Breakfast in Clevedon. After a few days the owner came back and said 'I've been searching on these listings sites, how come our site isn't on there? What have you done wrong?' I nearly choked and had to explain three times why he wasn't going to appear on holiday/letting listings sites he hadn't paid to be on...

Which bed & breakfast in Clevedon? I live in Clevedon.
 
This one's a particular cracker. Lady just walked into the office, said she needed to use the colour photocopier, I showed her where it was and got on with my work. She then comes back and says "it hasn;t copied in colour"

Oh, I said, that's odd. Then I took a look at what she was trying to copy - it was a black and white print out!

"Oh, it won't copy in colour if the original wasn't in colour" I said. Which was met with a blank look.

"Think about it, how would it know what colour to do?" I said. Again, further blank looks, followed by the penny very slowly dropping.

"Oh I'm just trying to think how am i going to do this now?!" She said. Well you can't if you haven't got the original in colour dumbo, unless you want this set of crayons and colour it in yourself...

Palm. Face.
 
Phone call today "Hi mate, i was just thinking about freshening up my logo. Should only take half an hour". "Fine" I say and ask what he was thinking "ohhh I just want to try it it in a few different fonts and colours and change the symbol".

So you want a new logo then? :icon_cursing:
 
I was laughing at linziloop's post until I remembered those Cannon (or similar) copiers that could add colour to a mono original. It was a mad (and pointless) feature on the CLC range a few years ago. You placed the original on the touch sensitive lid used a stylus to 'mark' areas and assign colours via the display. Then hit copy and out it came all coloured up. Bonkers and obsolete before it was introduced. Maybe she'd seen it done before.
 
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A frequent question..... "How much are business cards? "

Or letterheads, leaflets or anything else we can design and print...

I bet no-one asks Sainsbury's "How much is food?"
 
I know, last year I did a site. 2 weeks after the project finishing and customer being on holiday he rang me saying that you have taken the website off. Why have you done that? I quickly checked and found out that his hosting account had expired so they took of the website. I tried to explain it to him but he says 'You are the web designer, you sort it out'. Now how do you deal with that. I had to ring the domain hosting company to ring the client and sort things out for him. Never heard from him again.

i would have some choice words lol, but off course you want to keep the client "just in case"
 
Going back to the days of paste up, a client gave me a crumpled piece of paper to me with a very rough scamped idea on it and asked me if I could produce something from it.

A day or so later he 'phoned to see where his job was and I said I was waiting for the artwork and he sounded puzzled and said that he'd left it with me.

I hunted for it and 'phoned him back saying that all I could find was the crumpled piece of paper and he said 'yes, that's it'. When I explained to him what artwork was, he said he'd heard that we had a camera (PMT machine) that we could put his crumpled bit of paper under and it would turn it into artwork.:icon_lol:
 
Yes it is .... and also Photo Mechanical Transfer (it basically was a camera that made an image on a photographic paper from artwork - and you could scale up or down.)
 
Back in the days before computers...BC... artwork was pasted-up on board from either photo-typeset galley pages or, in a smaller studio, Letraset and IBM Composer (a golf-ball electric typewriter-like machine) with different sized fonts - very few fonts - we had helvetica, times, optima, century in regular, bold and italic but only in point sizes from about 8pt to 14pt. If you needed it bigger or smaller you could enlarge/reduce on the PMT camera. Then everything was carefully scalpeled and pasted with Cow-Gum (or a waxer) onto board. Lines were drawn with a Rotring pen and you had to be careful not to get 'blobs' at the end of the lines or smudge them when you moved the ruler. I recall drawing 10 different forms just before we got a computer and the client decided they wanted the columns slightly wider - nightmare - often you just had to start again!

I worked in a small printers and we used an IBM composer and Letraset and PMT camera - which also made our plates. A sign of a good designer was one who could draw good lines, and divide very quickly by 2 (for centering your paste-up). For large amounts of copy we would get it phototypeset and then paste that up. You had to be able to work out how much type would fit to a space before you had it set and there were special rulers to help you set copy and work it out. It was a very skilled job and many designers would have paste-up artists working for them. The designer would design and the artist would do the donkey work.

The first designer I employed when we first got computers couldn't get her head round it initially and would typeset everything on the computer, print it and then paste it up!
 
Wow, I knew stuff used to get cut and pasted (literally) but never knew the detail. Thank you.

..... we kinda have it easy in comparison :icon_blushing:
 
At least then people couldn't do it themselves...and we could charge a reasonable price. Probably soem of my prices haven't gone up that much from pre-computers!
Now every Tom Dick and Mary think that because they have Publisher they can design!
 
We've got an Omnicrom 2000 in one of the studios at uni, and my tutors was telling me about how exciting it was to be able to have COLOURED TYPE!

When you understand how it used to be, you can really appreciate just how design has become undervalued in recent years. I wish it was still seen as a trade skill.
 
Goodness - omnicrom! I still have some silver and gold foil that we used occasionally on photocopies to make gold and silver type (never really used it much - didn't work that well)....then came colour copiers and you could colour up different areas. And this was just for 'proofing' !!
 
Grr! One of my pet hates...I often use the analogy of trying to wallpaper a wall with a postage stamp...just isnt gona happen :icon_tongue_smilie:
 
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