LOL!
We used to go in the darkroom and photo transfer the vowels onto sticky back photo paper, because the "A"s were the first to go. I don't know if it was cheaper than buying new sheets, but that's the way we rolled.

Edit: Yes. You were heroes. It truly did take talent and skill to layout these projects.
$#$@#! young punks these days with their fancy typesettin' machines…

Meanwhile, back at the digital ranch?

I'd hit that. Just sayin' . . .


LL

LOL!
Tease…

Interesting to see you guys looking back on older tools of your profession. I still have my enlarger I ought back in the early '80's. I had just bough a new house (new for me) and hired one of my photo students, a carpenter, to build a darkroom for me. From scratch and with my needs. The Enlarger is a Vivitar VI with dicloric color head. Loved that enlarger. It was too tall to fit on the work space of my darkroom so I had the carpenter cut out a section of the countertop and attach the enlarger directly to it to save an inch or so of height. Those times ti needed to go big and needed the height, I could lower that section of countertop. Worked like a charm.

Asi said , I still have that enlarger and head with lenses . I would give it away.

Ah the past

Dave

In art school we used a local graphics house that made stats for us of finished art … they were moderately expensive. I inked a logo on illustration board, scratched/cleaned the edges, white out mistakes, etc … it would cost like $20 for them to put it under the camera and have a nice crisp black&white 8x10 photo print (ready the next day) …. then I'd spray mount it onto gray illustration board and tape a sheet of acetate over it. If I had time, I'd skip the tape & acetate and stop by the graphics house and pay them about $5 to shink-wrap it. This was the typical hoop to jump thru to show final projects in class, and it got expensive.

If I needed to apply the logo to a package design ( a bottle, carton, a book cover, a poster) I'd have to pay for these transfers called PMTs. They were like a letraset rub down of my original art, and they could be made in any pantone color. Those got really expensive and tragic if they didn't tranfer perfectly on the first try.

Those were the days.

Those were the days, indeed. I kinda miss them…
Another thing in my arsenal was rubylith tape, because we got tired of blocking out pinholes with a pen.

DEAR GOD! I understood all that.

At the risk of sounding like the Monty Python
'4 Yorkshiremen' Sketch "Up-Hill! BOTH WAYS!"

As Illustrators, we weren't allowed all them fancy
schmancy mechanical drawing devices.

We weren't allowed eXacto Knives (We used single-edge
razor blades, not only for layouts, but to sharpen
our pencils ((along with a sandpaper block)).)
Nor Rapid-o-graphs... we used a ruling pen.

Fuk press on letters... we HAND Lettered everything.

Krikey Paulette had it even worse.. as a Fine Artist
she was made to make her own charcoal, grind her own
paints, and stretch her own canvases.

The only modern stuff we were allowed was Grumtine,
rubber cement thinner & all the Bestine we could eat,
kneaded erasers, a SS T-Square, a true edge drawing
board and a bigassed leather zipper portfolio.

What sux is after 40 years, I still have my tons of
equipment covering about 20 different methods & media
all stored in the attic and hall closet.

Shytes harder to part with than an obsolete Mac Collection.

Yep, I remember being jealous of people who had enlargers (Hmm… that didn't sound quite right).
I've got a good one for y'all. We used to sharpen our old x-acto blades, because the boss was too cheap to buy new ones!
Hand lettering was a way of life.
The first time we could 'bend' type, it was a miracle.

I didn't need an Enlarger
(I borrowed someone else's)
but I still use my Exacta.

Hand Lettering,
(Cue W.C.Fields)
"Ah, yes, the olde 'Basic Stroke!'"
(wait! that didn't sound right either )

Promises, promises...