Tools of yesteryear II
posted by D. B. Scott at
2:01 pm
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
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13 Comments:
a proportion wheel for sizing photostats, and sometimes used for "FPO" purposes.
I had wanted to approach Texas Instruments back in those days to produce a digital proportion calculator for graphic designers.
–AJB
ah the wheel of torture
i remember using that for the newspaper I worked at back in 1983!
that little device told you how much you needed to shrink or expand a photo
Sadly, I've forgotten its blasted name...but hey, at least I remember what it was used for.
proportional ruler?
It's a proportional scale for sizing pictures! Had totally forgotten about the tool.
I still have my Proportional Scale, a relic from my days at community newspapers in the '70s. Copy editors sized every photo before sending it out, using a pica ruler for measurements. We glued a blue tag to one edge of the pic, indicating the percentage the image needed to be increased or decreased. If it was sized incorrectly, we definitely heard about it at the paste-up stage, and hoped a bit of creative cropping would fix the miscalculation. (Maybe this is how today's bizarrely cropped columnist portraits originated!)
Made us designers look like we were capable of complex math problems....Ahem, not that we aren't.
While we're at it, what about the lost smells of editorial departments past? Remember that sweet scent of wax from the waxer? The heady (headache-inducing) whiff of white-out? The inky smell of carbon paper? OMG, I am a hundred years old!(Not to mention the high-inducing scent of the gestetner machine--but I'm remembering that from grade school, not work!)
Wow, I remember using a proportion wheel for my high school newspaper. Pagemaker was brand new at the time, but we still did paste-up and photo sizing manually. What a trip!
- Lisa M
You know, I think I still have mine somewhere in a box with my reprographic pens..ha ha
Don't you think those "badly cropped" columnist photos are to level the field on balding vs not-balding columnists?
Sorry, you are all wrong!
I have one right here in my desk. Circulators still use that tool to calculate their magazine postage costs.
It's interesting that in the circ world it is also called a Proportional Scale. It provides an estimate of what proportion of your annual deficit is due to postage expenses.
Here are all of the proportional scale's pals http://www.drawger.com/?what=shows&show_id=32
Yes, the waxer. And the little roller for the wax. Art departments were way more fun. Now every dept is just people squinting at computers.
Gestetner machine? Is that like a Ditto machine? Oh that wonderful smell.
(apologies for threadjack)
And whatever happened to Letraset?
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