Graphics Before Photoshop -- A Recollection with Examples
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This is a mini-lecture video created for students at Johnson State College. It was made quickly and without a script or notes by composer Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, who was graphics designer at the New Jersey State Museum for two years in the 1970s. It describes the creation of a brochure and a poster for the museum in pre-Photoshop days, using foundry photo type, IBM Selectric Composer, bristol board, large camera and high-contrast film, Rubylith, silk screening, and just messing around to get the desired effects.
NOTE: This video was just quickly hacked together in my bedroom. It wasn't intended for a general audience but has seemed popular -- so I've kept it here.
Пікірлер: 45
so interesting! i love when youtube randomly starts recommending videos that were uploaded years ago to people lol. thanks for sharing!
necessity is not only the mother of invention, but also creativity. so much is created by limitations, as well as the imagination. what limitation exists these days? none, pretty much. design is very much lead by the machine, not the human. a human can sit there all day, pressing keys, whilst the tech generates myriad ideas. the human just picks and chooses. the creative mind became the creative machine. please don't get me started on AI 😁 so many memories flooded back watching this. i was a graphic artist in the mid-late 80s. changed career at about the time things moved from the real world to the virtual world. thanks for the memories!
@bathorykitsz
3 ай бұрын
Thank you for your thoughts. I think there are always limitations. Today the limitation is to avoid sameness.
@gasun1274
2 ай бұрын
The lack of limitation itself is a limitation.
Impressive work indeed! I started working in graphic design in the early 90’s and during my first weeks at an advertising agency was introduced to all these amazing techniques. But after learning them I then showed my department that all of this could be done on the Mac - using Adobe illustrator, Quark XPress and Photoshop - I ended up only using my paste up and mechanical skills once or twice. But knowing the traditional methods allowed us to push the Mac to do more that it was designed to do. Btw. Photoshop alone wasn’t the real workhorse back then - it was extremely limited. You needed a vector drawing app (freehand or illustrator) and layout app (PageMaker or Quark Xpress) to pull everything together.r
@bathorykitsz
4 ай бұрын
I understand completely. In fact, I'm a composer. And in teaching students, I am struck by them being prisoners of their notation or DAW software. With paper tools and handmade instruments, they can be freed from the limitations of software in the imagination stage. Admittedly, graphics programs even back then weren't constrained by 19th Century thinking as music notation programs still are, so imagination wasn't quite as held back. Still, discovering old solutions to design or music problems can be refreshing and sometimes tarnish the software that seemed so gleamingly all-capable to a young designer or composer! Thanks for your comment! (And I think you might have meant "Pagemaker" rather than "pacemaker". I hope so, anyway 😀 )
@ttpayton
3 ай бұрын
@@bathorykitsz Great thoughts. Indeed PageMaker, not pacemaker. LOL. I corrected it in my comment for the sake of others.
love how timeless the design is, thank u for this video & greetings from germany:)
SO COOL THANK YOU!! i am a graphic design student at western washington university now. i often find the technology (and how computer based the courses are) frustrating, so this serves as a reminder that we have it so easy now as well as gives me some great ideas about how to / when i should work analog!! love it thank you!
thanks for having the patience to save your work. this is valuable information for anyone complaining and whining about modern tech
@bathorykitsz
4 ай бұрын
I still whine about modern tech. It's part of working with graphics. 😉
Obsessed with that alternatives logo!! I’d love to see a video of how you crumbled it up and photographed it with the bed camera, I’m having a hard time visualizing the process but love the end result without the shadows
@bathorykitsz
8 ай бұрын
The printed text is crumpled to taste. 😀 Keep in mind that in those days (ca.1975), you sent out for your type; no computer output. It was delivered on photo paper, so you had limited chances to get it right. Because the bed camera had even lighting across the bed -- four lights, as I recall -- that cut out most of the shadows. It was then exposed on large graphics film (extremely high contrast), touched up with opaquing ink, and contact-printed from there. You could do it the same way by using lots of lights and a high-contrast setting in software.
Thank you for showcasing the old-time graphics design-it's incredible to see how things have evolved and become so much more accessible now. Truly amazing! Greetings from Ethiopia, Aklog.
@bathorykitsz
7 ай бұрын
Thanks for your kind words. We had to be really creative with physical materials back then!
@aklogtefera4319
7 ай бұрын
@@bathorykitsz Yeah, I saw that when you showed it in your video
This is great!! Thank you
very insightful, thanks
Memories of amberlith and mechanicals. Great vid. Thank you for sharing. Came across this today...same day I ran into an old ad design classmate at the art store. We laughed about the old Kohinoor rapidiograph pens, and how they were a nightmare to clean!
@bathorykitsz
7 жыл бұрын
Thanks! It was a dig-out-old-stuff-and-improvise video, with lots of edits later!
Would love to have a series of these
@odb1612
Жыл бұрын
same!!❤
I appreciate you making this video. Thanks. I've been very interested in learning how to make graphics pre-internet this helped alot
@bathorykitsz
4 ай бұрын
Thanks very much. I had no idea how much interest this video would generate. It was just for a class interested in old-school graphics!
Incredible! Thankyou for sharing ☕
I still have all my pens, rotrings, templates etc. etc...graphic designers these days don't know how lucky they are 😀
This is legitimately the coolest shit I’ve ever seen. Thank you for sharing!
this is gold! cheers from a young graphic designer from argentina
@bathorykitsz
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks! So long ago! :)
Rubylith had a distinct smell that I can clearly recall, like spraymount, cow-gum and the developing fluid for Agfa Repromaster prints. Funny, - the things one remembers after forty years. 🤔
Thank you very much for that! It's incredible for us as modern computerized designers to see this kind of work, things got a lot easier now. Congratulations for your great work, greetings from Brazil.
@bathorykitsz
4 жыл бұрын
Obrigado! Yes, it was harder. Sometimes I go back to it for inspiration! You can see I've kept all my tools...
Such a nice video
Man, that's awesome! You are Photoshop!
this is great, thank you
This is amazing
SIr. you are really an artist. regards.
Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
amazing!
I love this stuff
very cool
I love learning about old processes and sometimes think how fun it would be to make some of yhese layouts but then i remeber i sometimes lose my patience working on my computer so idk if i could of cut it
@bathorykitsz
7 ай бұрын
It's hard to imagine what it was like in the old days -- no computers, no cellphones, no digital photography. Everything with film that had to be developed, and you had to develop an eye for it because making mistakes was expensive! I can still do the old stuff, but only for fun, never because I have to.
HOLY CRIPES! XD
Mediocrity