Logo Talks

My career path in graphic design started in a very ordinary way. After attending college in Northern California at San Jose State University I started working in the early 1970’s at small design and advertising agencies in the San Francisco Bay area. It was the in the heart of Silicon Valley, at the start of the Information Age and the beginning of the consumer electronic boom. An extraordinary place and time to be a young art director/designer.
I was soon doing trade advertising and sales materials for the new products being pumped out of the surrounding high tech companies in the area. Among those early electronic gizmos were some not very attractive digital watches with their very hard to read displays. Another early “ground breaking” product I worked on as a young art director/designer was one of the first basic hand held calculators.
The “tools of the trade” I was using back then were basically unchanged from the ones being used decades before. Paper, pens and pencils. T-squares, triangles and rulers. Comp layouts were done with hand indicated headlines. Photos and illustrations were all roughed in by hand or Xeroxed from books and magazines. Camera ready “mechanicals” were all constructed by hand which became an art itself. Copy blocks of type and headlines printed on proof paper were cut up with x-acto knives then glued on to illustration board with rubber cement to make the paste-ups.
No Computers, no Adobe InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator. Layout ideas were shown rough so there was lots of “wiggle room” for a client to imagine just what he wanted to see. It was a far cry from the practically locked-down, camera-ready form as layouts are shown today. I didn’t know that I was working at a place and time that soon would be changing all those familiar tools of the trade for the graphic design world.

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