Font that time forgot.

I haven't seen this used for years. In fact, I don't think I've seen it outside of on-line volumes of freaky fonts since I last used it in 1972. I had a job for the summer at the New Life Centre in Bromley, Kent.

They had a sheet of rub-down letters (Like Letraset) in this font. I used it for a couple of jobs until we ran out of letters. The font was from Meccanorma, it's called Poster, and has been re-released

For you younger people out there - before the advent digital type we had three kinds of type in the main:

1. Phototypesetting, where people had very expensive machines with the letters on spinning disks usually. Setting was very expensive, I recall paying £25-40 an A4 page in 1980. Our typesetters had Berthold equipment. The disk looked like this. If I recall correctly, we had 10 founts to choose from.

2. Rub down lettering, such as Letraset. Each year I would excitedly get the new Letraset catalogue when it was released. It was an acquired skill to be able to put down a line of type that was straight and correctly spaced. I got more than one job in the early days that way. It also taught me a lot about letter spacing and legibility.

3. The IBM typesetter, based on a posh, complex and very expensive typewriter. Here's a picture of one. This used a carbon ribbon to give you clean type and best of all you could produce centred and justified text with it. Typefaces were interchangeable by lifting out the 'Golfball' that had the letters on it.

Here's a picture of one of the typefaces - although it should be noted this is just for the regular electric typewriter, it's a monospaced Elite.

All of the magazines and design jobs I worked on from leaving college until early DTP systems arrived used these - or a combination of these to produce print for reproduction by off-set litho.

Along with this, the artwork need to be generated by cutting and sticking to produce clean artwork. I was a very early adopter of DTP systems. When I started to freelance people wouldn't accept computer generated artwork, so I reverse engineered it to look like it had been done by hand.

Now days all of this is history. Producing 'real' artwork long gone. Even from today's stand point doing "mechanicals"; hand done stuck together artwork, is a short blip between 800 years of letterpress and the rise of computer based systems. I guess for professional artwork it was only around from 1968 - 1989 really.