There have been a great many tributes written about Steve Jobs, and mine will not be as eloquent but just my personal thoughts.
So what did Steve Jobs do for me?
I came into the print industry in 1982 and trained as a Typesetter. These were the days of cut and paste in order to produce a print document.Type had evolved from hard metal to being computerised, and the computerised machines became small enough for small printers to have their own. So I started work at Century Litho operating a CRTronic.
You only had access to a total of 8 typefaces, and that would include the Roman, Italic and Bold version of any one font! You entered a whole host of commands, like font-size, leading, width, it was of course the inspiration for html commands in to produce what the Graphic Designer wanted. When the document had been set on screen, it was then set to “print”. This was a complicated process that involved projecting light through the typeface disc onto paper, as it produced the type it went into a special lightproof box. Once this process was complete the lightproof box needed to be processed, in the same way that photographers used to develop films, only we had a large machine that did it all for us, but we still had to go into the darkroom to produce this. Once the paper was developed we finally got to look at what we had produced and what the type looked like, I can tell you it wasn’t always good news! It was a very time consuming process.
Over the years screen viewers became possible and you could see how it would look before processing the paper. However you still had to cut and paste in order to combine type and pictures.
and then came the Apple Macintosh …
Suddenly you could put it all together on one machine, out went cow gum, letraset, scapels, and the look of a Design Studio changed from to the sleek, clean looking places they are today.
But of course out went typesetting machines and typesetters. These skills are now gone forever, some of us who were lucky enough to train up as Artworkers, some of us went on to train as Graphic Designers. Certainly those early coding years have stood me in good stead for understanding html and css coding, that comes in handy when building websites.
I don’t think it is all good news, I look at print documents and shudder sometimes at the typesetting mistakes. Most people now have a computer and therefore produce their own newsletters, brochures etc but possibly the end result is that they don’t look as professional as it would have done in years gone by.
So Steve Jobs changed my life totally but I have still kept my typesetting skills and have spent the last twenty years learning new ones! I haven’t even mentioned the impact having an iPod had on my travel sickness and flying but that is another story …
One last thought, why do I love Apple so much? Quite simply it was Steve Jobs philosophy of only building the best, and keeping quality high. So yes I do pay more for my computers but they work and last for years, and in my book it is worth paying for, because actually in the long term I save money.
