I took a graphic arts design class in high school (circa 1983), and I’ll concur with the man in the video: this was both an art form and a gigantic pain in the butt.
Photoshoppers need to appreciate the magic.
[Before there was Photoshop | graphic design tools | Photoshop 25th anniversary] (Viewer #275,459)
Worked at textbook publishing company as editor in the pre-Photoshop, pre-PageMaker days, when every page had to be manually pasted on “boards” as shown here, before being photographed. Was present for the change-over to PageMaker, which didn’t always go smoothly at first.
Didn’t have to do the pasting up, myself, but had to be aware of how all these processes were done; and learned tremendously quickly not to ask for any editorial changes after the paste-up was done, unless it was absofreakinglutely necessary. We’re talking three-hundred page books. You did not delete a line on page ten unless you had a way to fill the empty space, because they’re not going in and moving every other page up a line.
The page numbers were pasted down by hand. It happened, once, that the sequence was off. Not only did all the subsequent pages in that book have to be repaired, but this cost me a whole “pass,” a few minutes for every book after that, to go through all the pages one by one, paying attention to only the page numbers, ignoring everything else, to see if they were logical. Then, had to do the same with the page headers and footers, before even looking at the pages themselves.
Found a photo pasted in upside-down once. Found captions under the wrong photos. Anything humans can do wrong, they eventually will.
I worked as a photographer for my college annual my freshman year. (I have one published picture, so I’m not Ansel Adams.) I still remember the picture of the watermelon the size of a Chevy Chevette someone had made sitting outside of the darkroom and the masks and cut-outs that they used to make it.
I worked in a technical publications department and we did cut and paste corrections, literally.
Occasionally the manuals would have a typo, ususally a misspell, like that one. (Typist knew how to spell, writer didn’t, and he could be an arrogant old coot, but a lovable character nonetheless. There would be a dictionary chase, and he would lose every time.)
To fix it, we Zerox’ed the bad page and typed up a page with just the correct text on it, usually about the same position, but it didn’t matter too much where it was. Then we put both pages together, original in the back, face down, on a light table (a table with a frosted glass insert with really bright florescent lights underneath). Now we could see through both pages and line up the original exactly square over the correction. Then with an Exact-o knife we cut a rectangle-ish hole (didn’t matter too much) through both pages around the word(s). (Cutting on glass dulls a razor blade really quickly! We bought blades in bulk.)
Then we carefully peeled out the bad bit and put opaque white tape over the hole, which stuck to the good bit through the hole. Then we flipped over the original page, filled the cracks with White-Out, Zerox’ed it, and put it back in the manual.
Oppo would call it ‘manual labor’, which we did.
Oh, and we did the same thing to insert illustrations and photos, too.
Boy, those were the bad old days! When a man and his knife could really be a cut-up.
“Oppo would call it ‘manual labor’ “
Exacto Monday!