Do conditions today give the ambitious young designer and printer the
same opportunities I enjoyed back in the late Victorian period? Not the
same, of course, but even greater.
While it is true that the Nineties were literally made to order for
a boy who had acquired only such training as was to be had in the
sparsely equipped print-ship of a weekly newspaper in a pioneer
iron-mining town, today is made to order for the ambitious young
designer and printer who is availing himself of the training to be had
by even the small-town beginner.
Back in my boyhood days a study of such examples of design and printing
as now reach even the most remote out-posts of the printing industry,
would have taught me more than I learned during a year in the art
department, so-called, of the publishing house of Rand McNally in
Chicago.
The inspiration to be derived from the text and advertising pages
of our standard magazines, together with the creative art of school
children and the art magazines, quite unknown at the turn of the
century, supplies a liberal education teaching the beginner how to
appreciate and use the printing and designing advantages of today.
What are these advantages, and why do they open a door to exceptional
opportunities not known in the Nineties? First, and perhaps of greatest
importance, is the typographic consciousness now prevalent, especially
in the advertising and business world, where it is universally
recognized that effective typography and design increase sales.
Another advantage is to be found in the significant mechanical advances
of the last few years, the significance of the growing importance
of offset printing, presenting so many opportunities yet to be
grasped by the designer. And, an infant industry now, but one of vast
possibilities, is commercial silk-screen printing.
But upon my return to New York after many years in California I think
my greatest thrill came when I witnessed the mechanical setting of type
by photography. Always I have liked the feel of putting type into the
stick, and I liked to see the composition growing on the galley. In all
my years of working with type I have never made a preparatory lay-out,
except when the composition had to be done by another, which happened
only on magazine headings after a style had been determined in advance.
But this is an age of lay-outs, and in this new photographic process
with the use of photographic enlargements, there are possibilities
for display composition of any required size, and great variety,
presenting intriguing possibilities for the creative designer and
typographer.
All such steadily growing advances present opportunities which were
nonexistent back in my own youthful days. Together with the superior
training enjoyed by the youth of today, they have changed conditions
into a new world fraught with wonderful opportunities far beyond any I
knew in the Nineties.
w b
Short Hills, New Jersey
May, 1954