fuck analog (for some shit)

we’ve been cleaning out lots of stuff lately, and i came across this:

they’re vinyl letters (helvetica type, for anybody curious) that are left over from when i used to do ads and club flyers. i can remember the first of this style i did, which was my high school graduation invitation (it was an 11×17 flyer) and i did EVERYTHING the hard way. got a blank sheet of paper, traced off the margins, did all the lines with pencil then re-traced with black razor-point pen, then pulled out permanent markers and colored all the black boxes solid then laid the press on letters over them.

the only thing that changed that summer between doing that AND starting to make flyers for real was i got smart and started cutting up black poster board into rectangles to do the big blocks of black, then went through and put my pencil lines down and laid the vinyl letters down, one by one, hand spacing them, to make the blocks of legible text i needed.

(between the lettering and coloring of big-ass blocks of black that would sometimes take a couple hours)

ah, the good ol’ days? hardly…i didn’t get paid shit, but at least i got to work with some talented fuckers (frank kozik was one of them) and we did it all by hand…but was that better than today? i mean, back in the summer of 1989 “photoshop” made you think of this shit:

Untitled-11.preview

and now, while the hand-colored black box version took two to three hours, and the poster board version took one to two hours, i did this in photoshop (based loosely on the format we used for those back then) in less than twenty minutes:

E Bloc 2015

so while i appreciate life handing me an analog world i had to come up with all kinds of work-arounds in, i don’t miss the literal “cut and paste” versus the “alt-c, alt-v” version…not that i’m not still good with my hands, you understand – i just don’t have to do THAT shit any more!

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