graphics the old school way

Our anniversary celebration continues this week with a few more posts looking back into our past. What you are looking at in the picture above is a layout of artwork for our printer. If any of you out there took a Graphic Arts or Printing Shop class in high school prior to the digital revolution, you’ll recognize this type of art board. Shop class is exactly where I learned how to layout out a multi-color design to be printed. Nowadays, all of this is done in the computer, which almost seems like magic for someone who has done it this old-school, labor intensive way!

In the picture you can see the final Christmas card design of Santa on the moon. This design is printed in 3 colors of ink: Black, Red and Green. Each of part of the design that is in a different color is laid out on the art board as a separate layer on a clear plastic sheet. Each one of those layers has to line up perfectly in order for the final design to come out right. Here are the different layers.

BLACK first:

Then RED for Santa’s suit (here you can see the layer underneath through the clear plastic):

Then finally, the GREEN of the flag:

If you look very carefully, you’ll see liquid paper on this artwork where we’ve “cleaned up” our drawing. This particular card (from 1997!) was a combination of clipart (the Santa) and our own drawing. The whole thing was painstakingly created one long night at Kinko’s Copies where we drew, xeroxed, pasted, re-xeroxed and so on.

A funny story about these art boards. With this line of cards we made the jump from a small neighborhood print shop to a larger commercial printer. When we met with them for the first time and we whipped out these boards to show them what we wanted printed….their response was “Geez, we haven’t seen THOSE in years!” Being self taught, we had no idea how behind the times we were. Our salesperson had to go get someone in back, in their pre-press department, to come look at them to see if our layouts could be used as is. When the guy came out he was the oldest guy in the print shop with white hair and slumped shoulders. He was the only one still working in the shop that knew how to make printing plates from these! He chuckled and said that he thought it was appropriate that we had retro-style artwork that we wanted to print. Talk about immersing yourself in a style! He was totally right.

-Susie