Ashes to letters
At one time about a quater century ago I was requested to tag along - being an “expert “ in all things related to graphic design because of actually owning several Adobe products that I acquired at a firesale - to a lettering company in the heart of my city. My role was relatively simple: translate whatever jargon would be thrown around from each side, make sure the good folks there understood the requirements, and that output would be acceptable. I had already assisted with formatting the Illustrator file appropriately, copying the resulting EPS to a Zip disk, and printing a hardcopy just to make sure, as was the custom in thise days. I though I had left nothing to chance. It promised to be a breezy little outing. Once at the lettering company, that looked more like a garage than a serious graphics outfit, we were sent upstairs to “the chief”s lair. Chief was a stout fellow with artistic hair dressed in corduroy, and generated enough smoke from an obviously cheap cigar ( expensive ones smell way better...) to compete with a medium sized factory. His messy, dark nook of an office overlooked the canal but was otherwise bereft of any grandeur. “What the heck is that?” the chief blurted out, pointing at the Zip disk. “Kind of the standard exchange doohicky for graphics files” I responded, since my companion was already sorely taken aback with the whole situation. “Wahaha no we don’t do any of that. Just give me that hardcopy!” Chief replied. After some deliberation, we decided to go along - after all, this was The Leading and Reknowned Lettering company, and there wasn’t really another option. Chief proceeded to pop open the ginormous Agfa flatbed scanner, and rested the smouldering stump of his cigar on the edge of the plastic casing - that had onbviously been subjected to this level of abuse ever since it had first been deployed. The edge was marked with black, ashy, molten indentations. I couldn’t help but be aghast. He noticed and laughed “that doesn’t hurt anything!” I decided it wasn’t my money, and somehow mustered a “Do you mind if I smoke?” which was shot down immediately and harshly. “No cigarettes!”. He proceeded to fire up some arcane text-driven software, frantically tweaking parameters and cursing every moment of it, apparently setting up althe scanned file to send to the plotter. “Can we see the result?” My companion asked, concerned about the costly operation’s output. “This does not have graphics, what do you think, we’re not NASA here! You will see when we make it. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine! Just go choose your colour with the lad downstairs, it will be ready tomorrow.” So we did, pick the colour of film that was the clostest match to the desired Pantone tint to match the house style, crossed our fingers and left - ie. got yelled at to get the hell out because they had work to do. The output turned out fine, but the events stuck with me because of the utterly incomprehensible process, and the poor scanner being abused so heavily by this man’s cigars...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
