It is hard to believe that it has been more than thirty years since December 26th 1988 when I arrived at my office to discover stacked boxes of computer equipment I had bought only days before — a Mac II with 4 megs of RAM ($350 a meg!) and a 100 meg hard drive; an 25-inch Ikegami monitor; a scanner and an external floppy disk reader. Even though I had almost no experience with computers, I set it up in an hour and loaded, launched and began to use Aldus PageMaker 1.2.
By the end of the week I had made my first brochure and realized that I would need a printer after all because I was actually producing real stuff. Then I had another taste of the future. I ordered a printer from MacWarehouse and it was delivered the next day. THE NEXT DAY! What? Why would I ever buy anything at a store again?
By 1990 we bought our first imagesetter. The cart it sat on actually took longer to assemble than connecting it to our network. We produced live repro within an hour, and never needed a service bureau again.
Other design studios were beginning to catch onto desktop publishing too. At board meetings of the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington it was always the hot topic of discussion. That year I was the publisher of the club magazine Full Bleed, and had the ambitious idea of producing an entire issue digitally and have members produce individual pages.
The format became an alphabetical primer with prognostications about the future of graphic design. Looking at the book now it is pretty primitive from a design perspective, but the miracle was that it could be done at all (and to be honest, a few of the pages were cobbled together from analog sources.)
Here’s the entire issue of the July-August 1990 Full Bleed, complete with meeting minutes and vendor ads. The list of participating designers might bring back some memories; some of them are still hard at work.
From today’s vantage point, it is what isn’t in the issue that proves the future was, as Emmit “Doc” Brown pointed out, “still unwritten.” The letter “I” is devoted to “Imagesetter,” and the letter “F” is filled by “FAX” with the exciting promise of color fax machines in our future. The idea of the internet and a world in which our designs are displayed and even created for viewing on screens was inconceivable at the time.
While the next three decades brought a revolution in the way designers created materials destined to be printed on paper, it also has largely transcended our reliance on printing as the touchstone of how we transmit information. While we may still cling to old-fashioned ideas like looking at a “spread” of a magazine in a PDF file, or the “front page” of a news site, we exist in a brave new world of instant—and perhaps entirely ephemeral—content all the time.
