after i graduated in 1986 from delta state university in cleveland mississippi with a bachelors degree in fines arts in commercial design and printmaking (before macintosh, as we know it today), i got my first job as a graphic designer at gulf publishing company (mississippi coastal newspaper) in gulfport, mississippi. there i did layout and design of newspaper ads by hand (no computers had mouses back then, all code…computers for me were only for setting type). my tools of the trade were graphical pens, rubber cement, scissors, rule tape, proportional wheel, crop mark and registration tape and a xerox copier. i did everything by hand, even color separations. i cut accitate or colored in where the color would go with a special red pen (i forget the name of that pen, it was permenant), then mark it with the color or percentage of color it was to be, then off to the camera room. yea remember cameras? those things you use as tables now.
moving along…during my tenure with the newspaper it was bought by knight ridder and named the sun herald. knight ridder is a huge conglomerate that owns media companies from print to tv. then there was cut backs and i got cut. they called it a temporary layoff. i considered it a permenant layoff and wasn’t going to stick around. it was almost a relief because that job was “high stress”.
continued – in the beginning – part two