A world made by hand: Design before the computer

Visual design’s roots are in handcraft. Cave paintings, petroglyphs, clay sculptures, hieroglyphic alphabets; tapestries, mosaics, paintings, calligraphy; hand-cut type, watercolours, lithography, silkscreen; in all of these, the artist executed their work manually, even down to creating their own art materials. This remained true well into the 19th century age of mechanical reproduction.

The user interface of handcrafting, if you will, is direct manipulation; the physical transformation of materials, the application of pigment to canvas, the placement of type into composing sticks, the pressing of roller to paper.

Computers took decades to evolve into useful, familiar tools for visual designers. Aside from pioneering computer artists who would hand-code their creations for output on oscilloscopes and plotters, it remained a remote and specialist instrument, disconnected from the handcraft tradition.

To design with a computer meant needing to think like a computer, to give the computer the correct commands, in the correct order, and produce the desired output.

Creating a bar chart using manual layout techniques. Scan by Gene Gable, from this CreativePro article.

Old school

I first learned graphic design by working on my college and university newspapers, in the late 1980s.

At college, we used CompuGraphics phototypesetters to generate body copy and headlines. Body copy was formatted and output from a green-screen EditWriter 7500, using special code keys to mark changes to bold and italic, paragraph breaks, and so on.

CompuGraphic EditWriter 7500. with 5" floppy disc drive, special function keys and copy stand. The font disc and exposure mechanism was in the blue cabinet to the left.

Inside the machine, once the story was sent to “print,” a precisely timed strobe light flashed through a spinning disc bearing a photographic negative of the typeface, to expose positive images of each letter of the story onto a strip of photo paper. It was like a typewriter that used light instead of ink.

Closeup of a typeface negative disc with multiple typefaces and variations, with position-tracking lines forming a ring around the outside row.

Developed headlines and stories were run through a waxer to make the back side of the paper sticky, then we’d cut them up with X-Acto knives to lay them out into column grids on galley sheets. Borders and lines were applied by hand with special vinyl tape; if we wanted to use fancy typefaces for a headline or title page, we used an enlarger camera to copy them out of a specimen book.

Every issue was a handcrafted product; we literally touched everything that went onto every page.