Back to the future

Was that a phantom buzz or was it a real one? Unsure, you prise your battered smartphone out of your jeans’ pocket. Real. It is a text message. Your mate looks enquiringly at you across the top of his pint, ‘whuh?’ the tacit question. ‘It is the inkjet’, you say, ‘it has finished the job I left it printing this evening. We will get it laminated in the morning’.

You live in a day and age where texts from print hardware are not regarded as minor miracles any longer. At work tomorrow you will be surrounded by technologies and materials that are relatively recent things seen in the context of signs and graphics overall and that are probably taken for granted.

When though, did the future that is your everyday actually begin? When did sign-making walk upright and become the animal we now know? Most qualified opinion says it was in the 80s. The 1980s, that is.


Before the technology landed, sign-makers in the 80s, or rather their businesses, came in all shapes and sizes just as they do today. In market terms though, and unlike their modern counterparts, 80s sign-makers were more focused on the production and supply of signs in the understood sense and not graphics in the round. Back then, the graphics trades were deeply specialised, divided forever by their tools, their materials and their practices—sign-makers especially so. Or so we thought back then.



If you wanted signs in the 80s, you went to a sign-maker. Exhibition graphics, probably to a photo-finisher. Stickers came from your local screen print company back then. If you wanted your vehicle signed, you had a chat with a sign-writer. For industrial graphics, you would have needed to see an engraver.

Tools of the trade

Among the production hardware roster in our 80s sign company would have been a pantograph. Massively constructed from cast and machined metal by wonderful companies like Newing Hall, this chest-high green-beast of a machine would command its place on the production floor. Once installed, it would stay in situ for generations—way too heavy to move around on a whim. Solidly built around a concept of enduring quality, with tapered bearings keeping things in tune, and over-specified in every respect, these machines would last for generations too.

To get useful output from a pantograph, it was necessary to have useful input. Put another way, if the operator wanted to cut from 3mm acrylic in Helvetica S, he had to have a Helvetica S in physical form to copy—that is because pantographs were, and still are, copying machines. To use one, the stylus had to be guided by hand around the object being copied, while the other hand managed the cutting end of the system. Using one took skill. Copying a font then was not a right-click operation. It meant surreptitiously buying the alphabet from another sign-maker and keeping it to copy.

With a recently ‘dressed’ HSS cutter and a pair of skilled hands, the pantograph would pop out plastic and metal lettering like there was no tomorrow or until the cutter lost its edge. Much of the lettering would have been destined for fascia signs. The lettering from the pantograph would be glued by an operator to an acrylic fascia panel before it took its place above the premises it was to identify.

Though ICI made an excellent Tensol cement for its Perspex acrylic, much of the industry in the 80s used chloroform for gluing acrylic together. It was decanted and slopped from five litre glass bottles and sucked into syringes. More than one bottle would have ended up on the workshop floor, closely followed no doubt by an anaesthetised sign-maker, who in the 80s would have never heard the words ‘risk assessment’.

Pantographs could enlarge and reduce the input source object but only within the limits imposed by the size of the output table and the mechanics of the machine itself. Larger lettering and logos were usually cut with hardware looking suspiciously like saws of one type or another.



Chopping decent looking larger lettering out of delicate sheet materials with a saw is challenging enough. Minus the invisible restraints guiding every inch of the cut, as was the case with the pantograph, the process was made a perilous and unpredictable one. The sole intervention between sheet material and cutting tool was a man. So what would have guided his hand in such circumstances? Nothing more or less than a drawing or, if he was really lucky, a template.

Some of the larger sign companies in the 80s and long before, had drawing offices staffed by sign draftsmen. The draftsmen were responsible for, among other duties, drawing full-sized lettering. A relative handful of exceptionally skilled craftsmen were capable of ‘constructing’ drawings from the primitive elements comprising the letter-shapes. Others who lacked that element of skill but who had the required hand, eye, and temperament used sources of reference.

One of the reference sources called upon was dry-transfer lettering. Letraset and Meccanorma created the market for dry transfer lettering. They supplied the product to designers and typesetters, mainly in sheets, and individual characters were rubbed off the sheet by the end user and onto the target substrate, often camera-ready artwork.
 
The sign industry used dry transfer lettering to make 80s style ‘fonts’. A font in this case comprised a couple of strips of transparent rigid material between which was sandwiched a strip of dry transfer lettering. The draftsmen would load the required ‘font’ into a projector and direct the image onto a screen, in this case a piece of paper. Contorting himself so as to not block the image from the projector, he would then sketch around the perimeter defining the projected image, not in exact terms, but something close.

Dry transfer lettering was manufactured by screen printing and was possessed of all of screen printing’s known print artefacts. When enlarged by a projector, those artefacts surfaced and had to be ignored by the draftsman. In cleaning up the output he would have sketched, the draftsman would introduce his own interpretation of the letter-shape, minus the artefacts.



Bigger letters were often destined to be fixed individually to the sides and faces of buildings. More high risk gymnastics were needed. Chances are better than high that, were you to arbitrarily fix letters to the side of a building, you would fix them in the wrong place. Each would be too close to its neighbour, too far from it or on the wrong base line. To eliminate the issue, 80s sign-makers made fixing templates.

A fixing template was nothing more than a roll of paper with marks upon it that told the fixer where to drill holes in the building. To make a template, a sign-maker and his co-worker would have to arrange the subject letters, with fixings attached, upon the paper, and move the lettering around until it looked right. The only way to see for sure, was to climb a very tall ladder or get another elevated vantage point. Press the lettering into the paper and you have your template. It had to be used once and then thrown away.

Rolls of paper were also used for making ‘pounce patterns’. A pounce pattern has letter shapes, nicely spaced, arrange upon it but not primarily in visible lines. Instead, the paper is perforated with lines corresponding to the shapes.

Men of letters

Sign-makers in the 80s would take the pounce pattern and tape it to a wall they were going to sign write. Next, powdered chalk was dabbed through the perforations to leave a dotty powdered outline of the lettering on the wall in chalk. Join up the dots, colour it in, and you have a painted sign. Welcome to sign-writing.
 
Of all the industry’s men of letters, the sign-writers were and remain some of the most revered. These are the people who can walk up to a blank sign board or a vehicle, and ‘write’ the required lettering onto its surface using brushes and paints. ‘Skilled’ only begins to describe their art. The results are highly variable but the best are a joy to behold. Producing the results, or watching them being produced, does something to the average human brain. Time moves not to the beat of a clock but to the passing of a brush. It is advisable too, to remember to breath while you are watching.


Sign-writing a very basic line of lettering involved, in at least one person’s observed technique, defining a base for the lettering and, in some cases, by masking the base line. As anyone who has ever lifted a brush knows, and many who are only familiar with computerised lettering may not, some lettering does not sit on what might be regarded as a natural baseline. For reasons that are the subject of a major thesis on typography, rather than this piece, some characters sit below and the lower case g sometimes makes up its own rules.

Painting in the lettering to the baseline, in the case of a line of small type, defines both fill and outline in a single stroke. The loaded brush will have much longer bristles than may be imagined and it follows the mahl-stick steadied hand leaving a beautiful, wet stroke, and a letter, behind it.

Sign-writers do not just draw lettering. They draw crowds too. Someone writing a van in the open will soon attract a crowd. Despite having heard them all, the artist, for that is what they are, will still laugh when he is told ‘that is not the right spelling’, or ‘that does not look straight’. The audience may not know why but they will be fascinated by what they see.

Brian The Brush is a Bradford based sign-writing business and knows a bit about the art. He will give willing pupils a taste, in a day, of what it has taken him a lifetime to appreciate. He runs a course, Google Brian The Brush and you will find it. Whether you have an appetite to apply paint or not, it may be time well spent. What Brian knows about lettering and its layout is as relevant to getting great results with today’s technologies as it is with the wet stuff he works miracles with.



He also knows all of the practical wrinkles only time and experience can tell too. He understands why it is not unknown for sign-writers to mix a little blue or black into the white so that it will stop the lettering looking pink on a red van. Techniques that have slipped the sign-maker’s vocabulary since the 80s have currency among modern graphics and can inform the work we do today. Spend a day sign-writing and you may emerge a better sign-maker in today’s arena.

All change

Disruptive change, when it came in the 80s, did not so much emerge as explode. Suddenly there was a new piece of hardware on the sign-making scene and its purpose defied conjecture then, just like a pantograph might today.

It was not exactly the prettiest thing. A product of the fold-it-don’t-mould-it school of industrial design, it looked like a big blue oblong can that might contain a delicate instrument or an expensive set of kitchen knives, but for the slabby-looking keyboard integrated at one of its bluff ends. A tiny little display, better suited to duty in the Apollo missions’ verb-noun guidance computers, just above the keyboard’s slew-key cluster provided feedback to the box’s user. Well, as much feedback as four characters could manage.


On the top of the blue box was a hatch secured with a thumbscrew and beyond the hatch was the box’s cavernous interior. To the right of the hatch and arranged lengthways sat a thing whose identity and purpose few knew but that we would now recognise as a muscle-bound plotter with its umbilical snaking away into the box’s dark innards.

The on-off switch required a stretch to reach it and had to be groped for—it was on the back panel of the box. When flicked on, the first sign of life was a fan spooling up into a low hum and then four beeps announcing some internal checks. ‘Read’ said the display, because it did not have enough real-estate to say ‘Ready’.

This rather agricultural blue box was a Graphix 3. Manufactured in the United States by a start-up sibling of the Gerber Corporation called Gerber Scientific Products and sold in the UK by a Bristol-based company called Spandex, better known at that time for its Slatz Directory Signing System.

Enter some text and press a button and, accompanied by some melodious mechanical sounds, the system would draw full size lettering on a roll of paper first loaded into the plotter. Slap those drawings onto some acrylic and you could use them as a cutting template. Stick the drawing on a wall and there is your letter-spacing drawing.

Substitute the pen in the plotter’s tool holder for a pounce wheel and it would make a pounce pattern ready for you to use as a follow the dots guide for sign-written lettering. That is just about everything an 80s sign-maker could wish for or needed.

O Factoid: A font for an 80s sign-making computer cost £245. Later, 3000 cost nothing. O

Adjusting inter-character spacing, letter height or changing font was a touch-button affair taking just seconds. Forcing text by adjusting spacing or squashing and stretching to fit available room was equally trivial. Best of all, you could have as many as eight, count them, eight fonts in addition to the unit’s base ‘Helvetica’. Every font could be bastardised to within an inch or two of its legibility thresholds.

The vinyl word

Without doubt, the best stunt the Graphix 3 could pull was the production of pre-spaced self-adhesive vinyl lettering. Cut it. Weed it. Apply it. Job’s a good ‘un. The capability owed its being to a clever knife that could be loaded into the plotter’s tool-holder. Deep in the brains of the Graphix 3, firmware instructed the steered theta-axis of the plotter to keep the blade tangent to whatever vector it was bearing on. When it got to a corner it would stop, lift, and turn, and then go on its way again. Sometimes it would get confused and dance on the spot before gathering its thoughts and getting on with the job.

Making lettering in vinyl had its appeal. An appeal that is taken for granted now. A few days’ sign-writing activity could be neatly sidestepped when all that was required was a bit of simple keyboard manipulation and a few minutes weeding. Self-adhesive vinyl did not need time to dry like paint did. It did not need to be adulterated with other colours to get it to ‘cover’ either. It went on easily and looked simply sensational.

Some unforgivably hideous signs were made by Graphix 3 computers and the world soon learned that having an eye for layout and spacing was a prerequisite to getting marketable output. Those who knew their serifs from their decenders did markedly better than those who thought you could automate everything and that talent came in the can too. In the hands of a ‘proper’ sign-maker or someone with an eye, a Graphix 3 could really sing. In the hands of a ‘keyboard-basher’ some ugly looking accidents were immortalised.

The Graphix 3 was what we are comfortable today calling a disruptor. It revolutionised what some might have then characterised as a cottage industry fragmenting it even further because it was easy to acquire. Some argue that it undermined the art. Others used as an agent of the art’s furtherance. What is beyond a scrap of doubt though is that it changed everything. It sold in the tens of thousands. It helped develop a market. It laid the foundations of the modern industry.

Like all great ideas or inventions, the Graphix 3 was a target for recipes that improved it. Its own manufacturer, Gerber Scientific Products, raised the bar by introducing the Graphix 4. This system was practically indistinguishable from the three but for a few more buttons. It could get its head around multiple lines of text though and even stretch to arranging lettering on arcs. Crucially, it could automatically kern contentious letter-pairs and so produced results that looked better to a discerning eye. The Graphix 4 also sported a more generous display, it could handle twelve characters at a time and so could actually say ‘Ready’ when it meant it.

Spandex was run in the era of the Graphix computer, and long afterward, by husband and wife team Charles and Mary Dobson.  Between them, the Dobsons were responsible for amplifying the creative potential of what was, by definition, a very basic text generation system. In the Dobsons’ hands, the Graphix lettering computer was pushed to the very ends of its creative envelope and then pushed some more. The Dobsons’ example in promoting the computer as much for its creative potential as its technological credentials put clear air between Spandex and emerging competition at the time.

Robot wars

As today’s industry bears witness, Spandex and Gerber’s exclusive grasp over computerised sign-making did not last. The first notable competition in the 80s was to appear in the form of an assembly of components answering to the name of the CSR or Computerised Sign-making Robot. It was the product of Grafityp, a long-established company founded in the 1940s in Holland. The CSR represented a total departure from the Gerber console format. It relied not on proprietary hardware for its smarts, it was instead driven by a computer. It might never have happened but for the fact Gerber turned Grafityp down as distributor.

Neither the CSR or the Gerber systems of the day informed the plotter format that was to come to dominate and that prevails to this day. Both systems used modified tractor feed arrangements to transport the materials that were loaded into them and that meant that the material needed to be perforated along its edges. The future was written, or rather cut, by a very attractive looking Japanese plotter designated the CAMM-1 and which had Roland on the manufacturer’s label.



The CAMM-1 unlike the CSR or the Gerber systems could handle just about any material format that would fit within its accommodating width. Little scraps, whole rolls, it did not care much. It differed too in being a plotter whose universe turned around two axes, it did not have a steered knife. Rather than turn the knife so that it was tangent to the direction it was cutting, the Roland plotter dragged it rather like a castor on a chair. It did some smart stuff when it got to corners to keep them sharp and it worked.

The Roland plotter was a portent of much that was going to happen as computerised sign-making hit its stride. In terms of setting markers for the future it threw some really telling blows. It was a friction feed device. It used a castoring or drag knife. Perhaps most telling of all though, it embraced truly open architecture and so could be driven by anything and anyone who had written software for it.

Roland was in the vanguard of companies that grew the market by making it more accessible. As a result, software got a lot smarter and did so very quickly, materials found an equitable price point in the market and performance was bought under the microscope so improving output on an industry wide front.

The future?

A recital of the succession of events post Roland CAMM-1 stands little chance of being inclusive or of being accurate until the era when the industry did a handbrake turn and printing arrived. Instead, we have come to rely on a few overworked adjectives to describe the pace and extent to which the defining technologies together got their arms around the industry and changed it beyond doubt, debate or recognition.

Today, sign-making is navigating an epoch defined by digital printing and is on an upward trajectory. Plotter and technology formats penned in the 80s still play today though. The assembled technologies have driven utterly ruthless industry convergence. Sign-making seems though to be a beneficiary.



Sign-makers today undertake work that was once the exclusive province of companies and indeed whole industries that have simply not survived the technological assault in a form anyone would recognise. Sign companies are now doing more than the tightly defined businesses of the 80s could have imagined.

Was that a phantom buzz or was it a real one? Unsure, you prise your battered smartphone out of your jeans’ pocket. Real. It is a text message. You have got the job of producing and installing decorative wall graphics at the new eatery that has opened in the out-of-town mall.
 
You will not be needing Dad’s pantograph for that.

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