There’s a mouse under my drafting table…

…but I have to ignore him because I have an open bottle of ink on my right and I just got most of the last spill out of the carpet. Usually the blaring Led Zeppelin keeps the mice away but today I have the waxer plugged in and the smell attracts rodents.

This was a common scenario less than 20 years ago for many graphic artists. The only thing that crashed was the needle on the record player when your Rapidograph pen rolled off the table and landed on the vinyl disks.

It’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago graphic artists did all of their work by hand. You literally CREATED an ad or a magazine or a book cover. I can remember that when college galleries had graphic art shows, most of the displays were paintings and illustrations used on album and magazine covers. When people asked me what I did for a living I told them that I was an Artist.

And I was.

Being an artist those days was a dangerous undertaking. I have two tattoos on my hands from sharp mechanical pens that rolled off my tilted table and landed in my flesh. I have twice cut the edge of my finger off with an X-Acto knife while trimming a galley of text for some magazine pages. I didn’t have any hair on my knuckles because melted wax dripped onto them daily. This all may be the reason that there were far fewer graphic artists back then.

We did have one other piece of equipment for our craft that had to be plugged in. It was called a stat camera. It lived in a darkroom because it used photographic paper that had to be developed in the dark with photochemicals, and then dried before use. This machine was about the size of a Smart Car. Maybe a little bigger. A great way to make a headline for an ad or a magazine layout was to use Letraset rub down letters on a blue lined board and then enlarge it on a stat camera . This would all take about a half an hour to do. Of course that didn’t include the time that it took to find the font that you liked in your typography books and then pray that you had the font in-house. If not, you had to order it from the art store. You paid extra for rush orders. Think about that the next time you’re yelling at your computer for crashing and having to wait a whole five minutes to get back to work.

Not everything was this work intensive. If you needed a vector-like illustration for your project, you just had to look through your library of newspaper sized, clip-art books and cut one out. Of course if it didn’t happen to be the size that you needed, you had to visit the darkroom again. What? You say you want a color image? Well now you either have to separate the image on acetate overlays or send it out to the color-seperator which will take another few days.

What I really miss from those days, is designing my projects with tissue paper, soft pencils and gummy erasers. I got to draw almost everyday and I really felt like an artist. I got really good at rendering type fonts with beveled pencils and drawing shapes with my plastic shaped templates. I wish I had saved more of those sketches.

I still have a lot of my old tools. I use my pica pole and X-Acto knife when I’m helping my kids with their school projects, and I still use a pencil for all of my writing and sketching. But now if there’s a mouse under my desk, I pick it up, put the batteries back in and re-establish the bluetooth connection with my computer.

Our profession has become much more technical, and in some cases somewhat automated by scripts and expressions. I’m glad that the speed of the process has increased a thousand fold, but I’ve become a DESIGNER now and I kind of miss the ARTIST part.