I just got an invitation to attend my high school reunion. (I won’t tell you the year, but it feels very long ago.)
I got to thinking about what I do for a living and realized that not one part of my job existed when I graduated high school (Great Neck South High).
None of the companies I write about existed.
None of the software existed.
None of the hardware devises existed.
None of the communication devises I use existed (cordless phones and cell phones).
The sad thing, though, is that in many ways, the artistic and fine art values that existed back in then, have been lost.
A generation of designers have been brought up with no concept of fine typographic ligatures, swashes, alternate letterforms, and so on.
The switch from film to digital cameras has created a slew of blocky, choppy, jpeg images used in print as well as the web. (Even the internet as we know it today didn’t exist.)
But there have been some advances. The other day I had dinner with a friend at a new Korean restaurant. We both marveled at the beautiful four-color menu that was both for at the tables as well as for take-out.
The menu was definitely digital printing, and up until very recently you might have seen a four-color menu at a table, but it would never have been the take-out menu.
The advances in printing have made it much cheaper to produce four-color jobs.
Now, my job is to make sure that the stuff being printed looks as good as it can.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on September 14, 2006
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