Long time passing. Yeah, there was a time when men and women sat down at their drawing boards and created art. Real art. From scratch. There was no undo. No button to add a drop shadow. No transparent backgrounds. Nah, back in the good old days we actually created something: Work.
See, most of us couldn’t do everything. I could take a picture, make a drawing, write some copy, create a layout, and get it to the printer, but in-between there was a lot of work done by other people. The photo lab processed my transparencies and made prints from my negatives. The type house would convert my marked-up, typewritten pages into galleys of type – hot or cold. Then the printer would shoot negatives, make masks, create screened colors and do a whole lot of work that we take for granted today.
Today I don’t even make roughs anymore. I look at the words and lists of photos that are going on the job and just do it. I read the text to figure out the object of the project. Then I shoot all the pictures I need – and then some – with my digital Nikon. Thirty or forty seconds later those photos are on my Mac. If the customer wanted, they would have provided the text electronically, but most times people are lazy. They’ve typed it out, but I get to retype it. No problem. While I’m typing, I think about fonts, and by the time I’m done, I have a general idea of the look I’ll be going for. I open Illustrator (or InDesign) and start the general layout by importing the text. Headline goes here, subhead looks like that, and here’s a good spot for the body copy. I’ll drag out a couple rectangles to get sizes for my images, then open Photoshop. My RAW images come into Camera Raw where I optimize them for exposure, white point, shadow detail, saturation and more. Back in Photoshop, I crop the image and retouch any blemishes and add the requisite logos and other enhancements. Once sharpening is done, the image is ready for importing to the document.
Since the images have been resized and rotated and cropped and clipped already, there’s nothing to do but place them on the page. A few minutes of fine-tuning, and the job’s done. Total time? Maybe three hours. In the old days, the same project would have taken at least a week or ten days because of all the people involved.
I’ll continue this some other time – I have some work to do right now…
Today I don’t even make roughs anymore. I look at the words and lists of photos that are going on the job and just do it. I read the text to figure out the object of the project. Then I shoot all the pictures I need – and then some – with my digital Nikon. Thirty or forty seconds later those photos are on my Mac. If the customer wanted, they would have provided the text electronically, but most times people are lazy. They’ve typed it out, but I get to retype it. No problem. While I’m typing, I think about fonts, and by the time I’m done, I have a general idea of the look I’ll be going for. I open Illustrator (or InDesign) and start the general layout by importing the text. Headline goes here, subhead looks like that, and here’s a good spot for the body copy. I’ll drag out a couple rectangles to get sizes for my images, then open Photoshop. My RAW images come into Camera Raw where I optimize them for exposure, white point, shadow detail, saturation and more. Back in Photoshop, I crop the image and retouch any blemishes and add the requisite logos and other enhancements. Once sharpening is done, the image is ready for importing to the document.
Since the images have been resized and rotated and cropped and clipped already, there’s nothing to do but place them on the page. A few minutes of fine-tuning, and the job’s done. Total time? Maybe three hours. In the old days, the same project would have taken at least a week or ten days because of all the people involved.
I’ll continue this some other time – I have some work to do right now…
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