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]

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.)