I remember learning this in school back in the 1980's. Things like, rubber cement, rubber cement pickup, amberlith, rubylith, non-repro blue pencil, acetate, crop marks, pica rulers, burnishers, press type and photostat were some of the things used. I still have my pica ruler from college, although I've forgotten how to use it.
Yes! What a rush to hear these words again after decades! Amberlith, non-repro blue, burnishers, picas. I was a graphic design major in the late 80s/early 90s. I think I was in the last graduating class to learn paste-up in college. Graphic design students today would benefit so much by doing a bit of paste-up work. Literally using my hands to arrange type and photos on a blank space is what made me really "get" the art of page design. And it's why I can really appreciate how lucky we are to have digital technologies.
I remember doing this for the college newspaper back in the 70s, even as editor-in-chief. We all pitched in, often staying up until the wee hours with our paste and scissors to meet the printer's deadline.
Started with Hand Setting (Muttons, Nuts, Thicks, Mids and Thins), moved on to Hot Metal Setting (InterType C4/Ludlow), Paste-up, Apple Mac (Aldus Pagemaker/Freehand then Quark/Adobe Illustrator then Adobe InDesign), even did Adobe Flash/HMTL. Now at 62 sweeping leaves in a School playground.
OMG I remember doing this 1985 to 1991. Then I would have to do the PMT, then the plate, you always had the lines on the plate where you could see the cut marks from the paste up so you had to rub those out! Great video!
I did Paste-Up and layout for a weekly free trader newspaper while in high school. Putting in quotes or artwork to fill up empty space between the different sections. We used to run the pages of type thru a machine that put wax on the back of the pages of type instead of rubber glue.
Those typos should have been picked up by the Readers before going back to the artist - assuming they still use Readers! There were times when I had to shift letters and words around to accommodate widows and orphans, but mostly it was to get the text to fit around a shape, say a graphic or illustration or clearcut photo. Seeing the whole process now, brings back so many memories. We used to get text set on hot metal, so the pulls would be on paper; later when photosetting came in the text would be on crisp white photo-paper, which was much better for paste up. The only problem with it was that sometimes the paper didn't spend enough time in the fixer and so would turn yellow, then brown even while it was being pasted down! Magazine paste-up is relatively easy, it's ad paste-up that's awkward, because there are so many elements to consider, including overlays for spot colour, laying in of halftone images, even hand lettering or that saviour of typography - Letraset! - which we used for both bold headlines, special effects or even lines of small type. This caused friction within our unions, though, because they saw it as a direct infringement of their territory. Little did they know what was to come!
I remember doing that many, many years ago and we even had a Linotype machine at school - loads of boiling hot lead splashing around - wonderful! Probably would not be allowed now because of Health and Safety. Thank you for this video. Bryony took me back 40 years or more; she is a very skilled lady. I was never as good as her - or had to be - thankfully. That made my day. Lorem Ipsum forever! 🙂 SB.
During the 80's i was a paste up artist in a magazine and in a advertising agency, many Exacto scars on my fingers from late night closings.Just seeing her remind how far we have come , it would take me a couple of hours to make a simple 8''x4 colum art, then the late 80's arrived the Apple Macintosh plus with tiny monitor trying to do a doble spread layout was pretty intense with page maker oh wait !! a external big screen was available full 16inches but slow down the processor abilty to half the speed.
Oh gawd. We used to do this with illustrated books. Remember gangs of all night paste up artists roaming Soho...although don't think she is served by her typesetters - they should have sorted out that hyphenation- or her editors - much easier to find a whole word to cut out then everything could jenga back with less cutting: the LRB always produces far too many words anyway, binning a few no bad thing. The satisfaction of getting a piece to fit with least intervention was nearly as good as parking in one move in an underground carpark. Happy toot down memory lane though.. thank you Bryony.
Brings back so many memories. I worked for a graphics / ad department of a major supermarket chain in the 80s - I remember around 86, the painful move on to Aldus Pagemaker (pre Adobe) and CorelDraw. I do miss the old ways though, we were a small unit so got involved with everything from the graphic arts side to paste up and copy cam. DTP was a revolution though - I remember the day we got our first flatbed scanner, it changed everything. To that end, we were disbanded 2 years later and the department incorporated to a few desks at head office, replaced in the main by young tech savvy Grads.
I ran a little artwork studio in Salisbury in the eighties, sometimes we worked through the night to get the camera ready artwork done for the next morning. We had a temperamental waxing machine which would often swallow small sections of typeset. Still got my old rotring pens, happy days.
my old job, typesetting, paste-up and camera work. Went to Mac and QuarkXpress in 1998. Didn't use a brush and gum though, had bromide paper and a wax coater.
I remember using big wodges of Cowgum to clean up artwork along with Ronsonol lighter fuel (Napha) to stop the glue from drying out amongst other things. We used to make up pages using IBM typeset galleys that bleed blue ink if you weren't careful when re-positioning. The company I worked for were too stingy for photo-typesetting, this would have been c.1980-81. Some of those edits were so small, you'd have to do them by eye and hope that they didn't move around on the layout on the way to repro. I don't know why, but we didn't use magi-tape then? I was only just out of school then and I'd only used phototypesetting, PMT's etc at the LCP (London College of Printing). I then went through the whole Mac thing from the early beginnings in 1988 through to 2009 which was great for me, as I loved typography🙂.
I received columns of text on bromide paper which was wax coated on the back and laid down on a mechanical. Readers would pick up the typos and sent back to the typesetter who would reset the corrected lines. After wax coating the corrected lines they would be placed over the original layout, not stripped in. This reduced cutting and lines showing up on the negative. With lines on the negative I would paint them out with model paint and brush, sometimes a chinagraph pencil or rubylith would suffice.
I have two questions: how exactly did the typographers set the text? And after the paste-up, what techniques are use while and after photographing to get rid of the lines and other stuff? Thank you for the video nonetheless!
The Typographer according to the publication's requirements (using typesetting terminals), will have already chosen the typeface and font, for main head, sub head, text, the leading (line spacing), justification and distance between characters. The completed page will be photographed, a skilled photographer (don't get mixed up with those who take portraits or landscape pictures), will be able to (on occasion) blow out those hard lines, but that particular text (galley) can be reset by the typesetters. It's been a very long time since I have worked as Typographer and Paste-Up, a lot of those who trained in these professions are now Webmasters.
Amazing. You really needed some serious patience in the early days. It's great to see pioneers in the process of creating what the computer has made easy and less messy.
I would have returned that galley to the typesetter. Bad end of line justifications. It’s much nicer to increase tracking to get a good line break. What we don’t see is how we arrived at evaluating the space needed for a given amount of typewritten copy. We counted the characters, measured the column width and specc’ed the type size and leading, when we received the galleys, we cut the columns to fit the layout. Also, we used wax-it was adjustable and neater. When it came to a crunch, sure we cut lines and words (sometimes added dashes) in extremis. I also did that with bilingual artwork, the second language would be on an acetate, in 6 point type, using white gouache to secure the small pieces. Then there would be a tracing paper overlay on which we indicated colours and other instructions to the printer. Useless skills nowadays. It takes a half hour with a computer what it took two days to do back then.
Knew an Art Director who would add bits of scotch tape to the smaller words pasted down. She called them "seat belts." For a paste-up artist, xacto-knives were your favorite tool. Not only for cutting out the type- you could use them to add bits of wax to the tinier type pieces, or to finish off the linework put down with rapidograph pen, or even to clean up photostats by cutting the emulsion (one of my favorite tricks). In the early days of desktop publishing, you could fake type by printing it bigger on a laserprinter, then reduce it on the photostat machine to increase the resolution.
My family runs a commercial pacakaging press and I remember hearing about this "paste-up" story and how dreadful and tedious of a job it was. But it was a lucrative career for those doing it for clients. In the beginning I thought film-based. colour separation and platemaking was dreadful, but this paste up thingy is just much worse.
I started as a paste-up artist in '82. Thank God Macintosh saved us all from this! Everything took forever. The typesetters were across town so our galleys would arrive by motor bike courier in a bag filled with cigarette smoke. One thing... I NEVER used scissors! You always cut out the galley with a scalpel and metal rule on your parallel motion. That way the edges of the paper were always straight and you could align everything so much quicker. But yes, slicing out individual letters drove us all mad. Fun times. (Shame we don't see the process camera!)
I did work experience at an agency that did this. I remember saying where are the computers? Being only 15 you don't realise that your comment will be putting people out of a job. I then went on to work in digital i 1992 where we had an artist where added antialiasing by hand!
Does she speak in a Conservartive Rp accent? I noticed it by the way in which she pronounces "back" (as [ˈbæk] and not as [ˈbak], namely the more modern variety), "off" (as [ˈɔːf])" and also by the quality of her "e" (for instance in "correct", in which it is more retracted, therefore she realises it as [kəˈrekt] and not as [kəˈrɛkt])
I don't understand why she had to cut up one piece of paper in order to paste it onto another piece of paper for photographing. Why not simply provide the first paper copy to the photographer? And if you have already got to the stage of having one printed version why the need to photograph that printed copy in order to enable more copying?
I suppose she would just get raw text in the right size from the printers and then she would make the actual layout, with ads and other content, from that.
Also there was no 'photographer', it was a very large camera with a human operator. But using scissor to cut the galleys is risking slicing through the type, ruler and blade is a better method, but then maybe she's a paste-up cowboy.
Many years ago I read an adult magazine that obviously used the same process. An editor read the past-up and realised the paragraphs didn't flow so wrote a few lines to link them, and the lot was pasted up without anyone spotting the non-flowing paragraphs were actually the same paragraphs repeated. Obviously the little voice in their heads was just saying "Nah, it seems the same because you've read so much of this already..."
I remember learning this in school back in the 1980's. Things like, rubber cement, rubber cement pickup, amberlith, rubylith, non-repro blue pencil, acetate, crop marks, pica rulers, burnishers, press type and photostat were some of the things used. I still have my pica ruler from college, although I've forgotten how to use it.
Yes! What a rush to hear these words again after decades! Amberlith, non-repro blue, burnishers, picas. I was a graphic design major in the late 80s/early 90s. I think I was in the last graduating class to learn paste-up in college. Graphic design students today would benefit so much by doing a bit of paste-up work. Literally using my hands to arrange type and photos on a blank space is what made me really "get" the art of page design. And it's why I can really appreciate how lucky we are to have digital technologies.
I remember doing this for the college newspaper back in the 70s, even as editor-in-chief. We all pitched in, often staying up until the wee hours with our paste and scissors to meet the printer's deadline.
Started with Hand Setting (Muttons, Nuts, Thicks, Mids and Thins), moved on to Hot Metal Setting (InterType C4/Ludlow), Paste-up, Apple Mac (Aldus Pagemaker/Freehand then Quark/Adobe Illustrator then Adobe InDesign), even did Adobe Flash/HMTL. Now at 62 sweeping leaves in a School playground.
Yes! I remember all of this. And I still have my old tools on shelves above my desk, too.
A lovely film. This is how we used to produce the artwork for 35mm slides before the days of Powerpoint! It brings back so many good memories!
OMG I remember doing this 1985 to 1991. Then I would have to do the PMT, then the plate, you always had the lines on the plate where you could see the cut marks from the paste up so you had to rub those out! Great video!
I did Paste-Up and layout for a weekly free trader newspaper while in high school. Putting in quotes or artwork to fill up empty space between the different sections. We used to run the pages of type thru a machine that put wax on the back of the pages of type instead of rubber glue.
I did paste-ups as a teenager until desktop computers took over around 1991-3. We used a waxer, which made it much easier than using glue.
Those typos should have been picked up by the Readers before going back to the artist - assuming they still use Readers! There were times when I had to shift letters and words around to accommodate widows and orphans, but mostly it was to get the text to fit around a shape, say a graphic or illustration or clearcut photo.
Seeing the whole process now, brings back so many memories. We used to get text set on hot metal, so the pulls would be on paper; later when photosetting came in the text would be on crisp white photo-paper, which was much better for paste up. The only problem with it was that sometimes the paper didn't spend enough time in the fixer and so would turn yellow, then brown even while it was being pasted down!
Magazine paste-up is relatively easy, it's ad paste-up that's awkward, because there are so many elements to consider, including overlays for spot colour, laying in of halftone images, even hand lettering or that saviour of typography - Letraset! - which we used for both bold headlines, special effects or even lines of small type. This caused friction within our unions, though, because they saw it as a direct infringement of their territory. Little did they know what was to come!
I remember doing that many, many years ago and we even had a Linotype machine at school - loads of boiling hot lead splashing around - wonderful! Probably would not be allowed now because of Health and Safety.
Thank you for this video. Bryony took me back 40 years or more; she is a very skilled lady. I was never as good as her - or had to be - thankfully.
That made my day. Lorem Ipsum forever! 🙂
SB.
I miss using my hands. Yeah computer software makes a lot of designing so much easier and more versatile. I just miss the physical craft of it.
So do I. This brings back so many great memories. We used wax instead of Cow Gum.
@@davidmarsh3674 I remember using hot type for the body text and it would smudge if you didn’t spray krylon on it.
During the 80's i was a paste up artist in a magazine and in a advertising agency, many Exacto scars on my fingers from late night closings.Just seeing her remind how far we have come , it would take me a couple of hours to make a simple 8''x4 colum art, then the late 80's arrived the Apple Macintosh plus with tiny monitor trying to do a doble spread layout was pretty intense with page maker oh wait !! a external big screen was available full 16inches but slow down the processor abilty to half the speed.
I did that kind of work at one time. Indeed a lost art. Some aspects of it deservedly so; others greatly missed.
Oh gawd. We used to do this with illustrated books. Remember gangs of all night paste up artists roaming Soho...although don't think she is served by her typesetters - they should have sorted out that hyphenation- or her editors - much easier to find a whole word to cut out then everything could jenga back with less cutting: the LRB always produces far too many words anyway, binning a few no bad thing. The satisfaction of getting a piece to fit with least intervention was nearly as good as parking in one move in an underground carpark. Happy toot down memory lane though.. thank you Bryony.
Brings back so many memories. I worked for a graphics / ad department of a major supermarket chain in the 80s - I remember around 86, the painful move on to Aldus Pagemaker (pre Adobe) and CorelDraw. I do miss the old ways though, we were a small unit so got involved with everything from the graphic arts side to paste up and copy cam. DTP was a revolution though - I remember the day we got our first flatbed scanner, it changed everything. To that end, we were disbanded 2 years later and the department incorporated to a few desks at head office, replaced in the main by young tech savvy Grads.
Interesting video
I ran a little artwork studio in Salisbury in the eighties, sometimes we worked through the night to get the camera ready artwork done for the next morning. We had a temperamental waxing machine which would often swallow small sections of typeset. Still got my old rotring pens, happy days.
I worked in one print shop in California in early 2000s, and it was the process used there.
Lovely short film - very happy to be a subscriber in your fortieth year...
Thanks Des! Very glad to have you
I remember doing this for my school newspaper, circa 1994/95 - we were a fairly low-tech publication!
my old job, typesetting, paste-up and camera work. Went to Mac and QuarkXpress in 1998. Didn't use a brush and gum though, had bromide paper and a wax coater.
I remember using big wodges of Cowgum to clean up artwork along with Ronsonol lighter fuel (Napha) to stop the glue from drying out amongst other things. We used to make up pages using IBM typeset galleys that bleed blue ink if you weren't careful when re-positioning. The company I worked for were too stingy for photo-typesetting, this would have been c.1980-81. Some of those edits were so small, you'd have to do them by eye and hope that they didn't move around on the layout on the way to repro. I don't know why, but we didn't use magi-tape then? I was only just out of school then and I'd only used phototypesetting, PMT's etc at the LCP (London College of Printing). I then went through the whole Mac thing from the early beginnings in 1988 through to 2009 which was great for me, as I loved typography🙂.
She's a genius!! Superb presentation.
It's so nice to see the legacy methods!
memories flooding back 😁 an 80s teenager wielding her scalpel for the first time and the (genuinely) intoxicating aroma of cowgum 😆
What a lovely film. Brought back such memories!
Wonderfully narrated.
Okay, this is totally encompassing. Just add Bestine. ❤️
I received columns of text on bromide paper which was wax coated on the back and laid down on a mechanical. Readers would pick up the typos and sent back to the typesetter who would reset the corrected lines. After wax coating the corrected lines they would be placed over the original layout, not stripped in. This reduced cutting and lines showing up on the negative. With lines on the negative I would paint them out with model paint and brush, sometimes a chinagraph pencil or rubylith would suffice.
I do this to prototype scientific posters sometimes, nice rapid way to try many layouts and combinations of figures.
I have two questions: how exactly did the typographers set the text? And after the paste-up, what techniques are use while and after photographing to get rid of the lines and other stuff? Thank you for the video nonetheless!
The Typographer according to the publication's requirements (using typesetting terminals), will have already chosen the typeface and font, for main head, sub head, text, the leading (line spacing), justification and distance between characters. The completed page will be photographed, a skilled photographer (don't get mixed up with those who take portraits or landscape pictures), will be able to (on occasion) blow out those hard lines, but that particular text (galley) can be reset by the typesetters. It's been a very long time since I have worked as Typographer and Paste-Up, a lot of those who trained in these professions are now Webmasters.
7:17 - First and third columns, widows unspotted!
Amazing. You really needed some serious patience in the early days. It's great to see pioneers in the process of creating what the computer has made easy and less messy.
This was my first ever art job. Seeing this make my spine cringe.. I can still smell the spray adhesive.
I would have returned that galley to the typesetter. Bad end of line justifications. It’s much nicer to increase tracking to get a good line break. What we don’t see is how we arrived at evaluating the space needed for a given amount of typewritten copy. We counted the characters, measured the column width and specc’ed the type size and leading, when we received the galleys, we cut the columns to fit the layout. Also, we used wax-it was adjustable and neater. When it came to a crunch, sure we cut lines and words (sometimes added dashes) in extremis. I also did that with bilingual artwork, the second language would be on an acetate, in 6 point type, using white gouache to secure the small pieces. Then there would be a tracing paper overlay on which we indicated colours and other instructions to the printer. Useless skills nowadays. It takes a half hour with a computer what it took two days to do back then.
It's still remarkable to remember where these process names - still used today in digital publishing, came from.
Knew an Art Director who would add bits of scotch tape to the smaller words pasted down. She called them "seat belts."
For a paste-up artist, xacto-knives were your favorite tool. Not only for cutting out the type- you could use them to add bits of wax to the tinier type pieces, or to finish off the linework put down with rapidograph pen, or even to clean up photostats by cutting the emulsion (one of my favorite tricks).
In the early days of desktop publishing, you could fake type by printing it bigger on a laserprinter, then reduce it on the photostat machine to increase the resolution.
By
J.v
Thank god for Indesign, I worked in the 1980’s doing this, I don’t know how I made a magazine like this.
My family runs a commercial pacakaging press and I remember hearing about this "paste-up" story and how dreadful and tedious of a job it was. But it was a lucrative career for those doing it for clients. In the beginning I thought film-based. colour separation and platemaking was dreadful, but this paste up thingy is just much worse.
I started as a paste-up artist in '82. Thank God Macintosh saved us all from this! Everything took forever. The typesetters were across town so our galleys would arrive by motor bike courier in a bag filled with cigarette smoke. One thing... I NEVER used scissors! You always cut out the galley with a scalpel and metal rule on your parallel motion. That way the edges of the paper were always straight and you could align everything so much quicker. But yes, slicing out individual letters drove us all mad. Fun times.
(Shame we don't see the process camera!)
Thank you.
I did work experience at an agency that did this. I remember saying where are the computers? Being only 15 you don't realise that your comment will be putting people out of a job.
I then went on to work in digital i 1992 where we had an artist where added antialiasing by hand!
Still have my scalpel, steel rule, folding linen prover, and Cow Gum. Also have Adobe software which does save a bit of time I suppose.
Thank you for this! I wonder what we lose when we no longer do things so painstakingly.
I don't know what you lose but you keep your sanity.
Maya G nothing like hard work satisfaction
Wow Amazing ...
Thank you!!
Thanks to Scott Weiland who was a professional in this trade back in the 80s , and offcourse thanks to Briony !!!
Seeing this makes me realize what a good deal magazine prescriptions were.
I almost got a job as a paste up artist for the herald but , a car accident happened,sorry I missed the experience
What was the wax solvent called?
Putting a tape over text is a big no-no. It's gonna change the density of the font.
Wow
That's basically what some jobs will look like to us in a few years after AI becomes more prominent at work
Does she speak in a Conservartive Rp accent? I noticed it by the way in which she pronounces "back" (as [ˈbæk] and not as [ˈbak], namely the more modern variety), "off" (as [ˈɔːf])" and also by the quality of her "e" (for instance in "correct", in which it is more retracted, therefore she realises it as [kəˈrekt] and not as [kəˈrɛkt])
I'm English, for me there is a hint of Australian to her vowels.
Is she using glue because waxers dont exist anymore? Or did she really use glue?!
Yeah, we rolled them through the waxer. That smell I would like to experience again.
We used copydex, a latex solution (used to smell of ammonia)
I don't understand why she had to cut up one piece of paper in order to paste it onto another piece of paper for photographing. Why not simply provide the first paper copy to the photographer? And if you have already got to the stage of having one printed version why the need to photograph that printed copy in order to enable more copying?
I suppose she would just get raw text in the right size from the printers and then she would make the actual layout, with ads and other content, from that.
She was doing layout. The typesetters didn't have the ability to do that function before "desktop publishing" became a thing.
@@alananderson2616 Thanks.
Also there was no 'photographer', it was a very large camera with a human operator.
But using scissor to cut the galleys is risking slicing through the type, ruler and blade is a better method, but then maybe she's a paste-up cowboy.
@@dnavid thanks.
Many years ago I read an adult magazine that obviously used the same process. An editor read the past-up and realised the paragraphs didn't flow so wrote a few lines to link them, and the lot was pasted up without anyone spotting the non-flowing paragraphs were actually the same paragraphs repeated. Obviously the little voice in their heads was just saying "Nah, it seems the same because you've read so much of this already..."
what a nightmare.
This seems so incredibly frustrating. All this just for the sake of appearance