once was

[rm]

via zarq

Things that are soon to be no more if they aren't gone already: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/12/AR2008031203187.html

I challenge you to guess which one makes me saddest.

Comments

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Affordable theater tix or handwritten letters? :)


My first instinct was to say an article of clothing... but honestly, I can't imagine you waxing nostalgically for the days when girdles were in fashion!

[rm.livejournal.com]

Nope, none of the above, although theatre tickets were never that affordable -- we just forget about inflation. I do miss when Broadway was less tacky and less about singing cats, but nope, none of those. And I've only worn girdles for acting gigs set in the 1930s.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

I must be remembering a time when I had more free cash. :)

Then I would guess crows feet / laugh lines. Women (and men) used to be able to grow old gracefully....)

[rm.livejournal.com]

I do miss that (Nicole Kidman, WTF?), but nope.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Hrm.... Vanities?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Nope. Although I hated not having one as a kid, and want the fabulous robin's egg blue wood one my mom has.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Hmf. At this point, I'd just be picking items randomly off the list. :)


OK, Wite Out. :D

[rm.livejournal.com]

No, but you're in the right category. The hint, that's a give away, again, if anyone knows what it is, is remember that my father was an ad agency art director.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

!!! Press Type!

My grandfather worked 30+ years in the industry and was an art director for Paramount and later DHB. He must have designed hundreds of ad campaigns, including movie posters, banners and marquees. My mother has a ton of type blocks, and font books.

In the late 80's, I sat with him and showed him what MSWord could do. He was completely floored. Had the same reaction when I showed him Photoshop and Illustrator in the late 90's.

He had a huge influence on my life -- much more than my own father. My son is named for him.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yup, Press type! We still have probably pounds of it in my father's house. I used it for every school project that had any design element in it growing up, and it was an art to do it just right so the letters wouldn't crack. There was even a little metal burnishing tool you could buy at Sam Flax. I don't even know if the stuff is made anymore. I can feel the wax on the sheets just thinking about it.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. I did the same thing! I used to use blocks that had design elements on them when I set up the presentation displays for science projects. Corners. Squiggles. That sort of thing.

I doubt they're still being made. It's rather sad. The computer has made them totally obsolete.

I assume your father was working in the industry when it was completely revamped by computers? My grandfather left in 1981... he just missed the major changes by a handful of years.

We have a couple of wooden type block cases in the house. (Like this.) Had them hanging on our walls and used them to display stuff, but I took them down in January when I converted our second bedroom into the nursery.

[rm.livejournal.com]

My dad left his last agency in the late 80s, but continued to work in the field until a few years ago. He got the software programs and understands them well enough to play and work on personal projects. Since he was a creative director by then, it was enough. But before that, yeah, the damn press type (which lives in my mother's sewing closet) was all over the dining room table when he was working at home.

Weirdly, when I was in J-school in the early 90s, I had to take a course on headline writing and had to memorize the typographical values of the width of each letter to practice headline writing, at a point when it was already pretty much computers that would do it for you. Between that and the press type, I probably know more about kerning than any human should.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

It's a good skill for a copy editor to have, though. I suspect many people who use programs like Illustrator, InDesign, Quark and Photoshop have no idea what kerning is.

I assume you've seen this: http://www.ironicsans.com/2008/02/idea_a_new_typography_term.html

Hehe. That sounds familiar! My mom has extremely heavy boxes of type in her garage and living room closet. She never looks at them.

My grandfather's thing was colored pencils. He used to ask my grandmother to describe what color they were, (he was color blind,) tag them with a handwritten piece of masking tape and then his sketch pads and a random collection of colored pencils would wind up all over the house.

[tdanaher.livejournal.com]

I still have one of those burnishing tools, sort of a pen shape with a little metal ball on one end and a flat bit on the other depending on whether you needed to burnish tiny type or the larger design elements like zarq mentions.

I'm laughing at how I've been around long enough to remember when a fair chunk of those disappearing things hadn't even been invented yet. Newbies and their electric typewriters, sheesh. :)

(Tangent: knowing about kerning, do you notice bad kerning in movie end credits? My moviegoing pals have a sport of looking for instances of people named things like CALLAWAY and seeing whether the titles designer cared.)

[drfardook.livejournal.com]

Ah... that's what that stuff was called.

My dad had a couple boxes of it lying around. Not sure why an architect needed it although he's probably the last generation of architects who can still do drafting by hand so he might have used it on blueprints.

[zarq.livejournal.com]

And yeah... she's freakishly doll-like.