I guess it was about 40 some year ago now that I got my first Mac, an LC with a 12″ color monitor. My first computer was an Apple //c. I spent days playing games in green monochrome, occasionally hooking it up to my parent’s color television, and having this self-contained, high resolution, 256-color screen was an absolute revelation.
My aunt is a graphic designer and she introduced me to all that the Mac was capable of. But I’d already been a bit of a designer, drawing, designing, creating by hand. The typographic capabilities of the Mac at the time fascinated me. Before the Mac I’d used the PrintShop and Newsroom to create designs with type and clip art. I’d create type specimen pages for all the typefaces I could acquire, getting a feel ro all the different flavors.
Ironically, I never joined any yearbook teams, or did much “official” designs work from 4-th-12th grade. I used 9th grad vocabulary as an excuse to play with type. I’m pretty sure I tried typesetting my high school essays, too. My senior year I made some graphics for the yearbooks ad hoc. Yeah, I know. At least I didn’t use papyrus?
Nor did I ever really try and create my own typeface, not even in college when I’d switched over to a double major in music and graphic design and progressed through three years of graphic design classes. For the most part, for those 15 years from 4th grade to sixth-year-super-senior, I was just having fun.
Then came working. I recall constantly trying to hold on to that feeling of fun, even if I had to listen more to clients and senior designers. I simultaneously had a tremendous ego just out of university. Learning all the “rules” of gestalt gives you a confidence that you’re a “real” designer. But I had my weaknesses, and I knew it, so I was extremely self conscious I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, really.
Thirty years later, I can look back on it and make some sense of the somewhat convoluted path for what it was: learning, failing, being curious, defending my design and artistic sensibilities while remaining open to learning. The same could be said of how I approach music.
All it takes is a spark…
About a year ago, I started diving into restoring old Macs. Actually, it started with “I want to write my books using an old Apple Extended Keyboard” and that turned into “I want to use QuarkXPress to layout my next book on a vintage Mac using System 7.1.1 Pro”
What I miss about graphic design is the discovery, the fun od finding fonts and adjusting Bézier curves with a deadline or purpose. When I recently found an Etsy seller making laser-etched floppy coasters, I got inspired to recreate a few of my own.
That lit a spark. I loved finding the finding the labels, identifying the fonts, using image trace and cleaning up the Bézier curves to recreate the labels.
But then I thought what if I could recreate these? And so I started reimagining some of them.
This is the stuff that got me all excited about design. Understanding it, playing with it. There’s no real point to recreating and reimagining these labels beyond that. I’m having fun again.