How do they do it?

There is a sort of expectation that you will be able to see for yourself how things are done nowadays without the need of an instruction manual. This to me, is the wrong attitude. I am very old school on this. I was asking my eldest how to forward on a comment and image to just a select few contacts on a well-known social media site. He could not resist laughing at my ineptitude—until I had to remind him that I was the one who once taught him how to use a spoon. Adopting new ideas and techniques can be done, after all, I am living proof but please, do not expect everyone to be on the same wavelength.

Take the ‘pleasure’ of online shopping, for instance. Who here used to sift through pages and pages of catalogues to find the exact widget to attach to that flange sprocket, then jump on a bus, find a shop that sells widgets, have a nice chat with the person behind the counter, and wait three weeks for it to be delivered. Why change that? It is the way it is.

Now all you have to do is exercise your scrolling/swiping finger, sift through pages and pages of, what is basically an ad-infinitum on screen catalogue, find it, order it, pay for it, and have it delivered in a day or two, and all from the comfort of wherever you get your comfort from. In years to come, nature would have evolved the human hand to have the index finger the largest and most dexterous digit.

Or you have a bit of a party coming up and want to get the music right. All you had to do was go to town and stand in a booth listening to the top 40 on vinyl before deciding the playlist. If you were clever, you could take the microphone on your Sony cassette tape recorder closer to the radio speakers and by deft handling of the record and stop/pause buttons, tape the top forty onto a cassette. There might be a hiss on the tape drowning out the lyrics but it was thus always the way.

Then some bright spark invented the concept of a smartphone and said: “No. Forget the bus and the trip into town and all that follows, welcome to the new world I have dreamed for you.



“What you need is a slim rectangle of plastic about the size of a small postcard with some electrical bits inside.It has a ‘touch’ screen, can take pictures or film or voice recordings, and can send typed or spoken messages or images to another person anywhere. You can play on screen interactive games, it will connect you to a catalogue that can find your widget within 0.636 seconds and just about any other piece of information the world has to offer. You can read books and newspapers, manipulate other devices in and around your home and, just so that we do not forget, carry around something like 10,000 songs that can also be broadcast from this device to some battery operated speakers the size of a coffee mug that have probably more power and better sound quality than those used by the Beatles when they first played the Reeperbahn in Hamburg.”

Problem solved

It is not just the pace of technology that astonishes me, it is the ingenuity that a human being (or a group of them) can see a problem that could do with some attention, then work out how to do it down to the nth degree. They thought of this before you even knew that you needed it. There may have been some customer input e.g. “Err, I would like to use the device as a phone as well please” but in the main, you took what was on offer because it just kept on getting better and better but the point is, you were told about it. You never asked for it (for the purpose of this missive, ignore things like the need to discover cures in medicine for the simple reason that it is obvious that the dire need for cures has been necessary since we crawled out of the swamp and first stood on two feet).


Sometimes I just stand in awe at the structure before me or the technology utilised to make it happen.

I am referring to the fact that someone, somewhere, is right now thinking that to do so and so, we need to do this and that, make one of those but slightly different so that that goes into there and comes out here. Their colleague then says “Ah, but if we did it this way we could do this and then make it from that, which in turn will allow that to happen and then we could produce one of these” and so on. All for something we did not know we would need.



Seemingly, a lot of ideas nowadays are improvements on existing ones, but there is still a vast untapped pool of imagination and originality out there and it is, in my experience, in abundance in the sign industry.

I say this because sign-makers today are in no way limited. The array of materials, machinery, and techniques far outstrip the sign-maker of 40 years ago, and although certain things have hardly changed during that time, a lot more has. It keeps on happening and I bet that there are some materials or techniques that have been around a while that can still hold their own, but people have simply forgotten about or moved on from.


My concern is for those who do not find time to step out from the muck and bullets of day-to-day manufacturing and discover or even rediscover things that can make their sign company one of the best. Being outmanoeuvred by cannier operators, who have just whisked your clients off to pastures new with something different is common nowadays.

Keeping pace with all the change and remembering what went before can be a challenge. My only request is that it comes with an instruction manual.



Public Notice:

• The internet has revolutionised shopping
• Smartphones offer so much in terms of information and contact
• There is a vast untapped pool of imagination in the sign industry
• Keeping pace with change and remembering what went before is difficult

The British Sign and Graphics Association (BSGA) history dates back more than 70 years when a group of leading sign-makers
formed the Master Sign Makers Association (MSMA) with the aim of promoting the sign industry and defending its interests.
For more information on the issues discussed in this article visit www.bsga.co.uk or tel: 0845 338 3016


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