Friday, January 9, 2009

the good old days of old fashioned advertising!

THis is a little bit of a retro! Youngsters may desist from reading...
Bumped into an old friend from the advertisng business a couple of days back. Thought the agenda was purely business we somehow managed to get into reminising about how wonderful the agency scene was twenty years back. The days of photo typesetting, cut paste artists, rubber solution et all!!
Typeset artworks with separations in CMYK, Rotring point pens (gawd! does anyone remember Rotring!!!??), Pantone colour sheets, type point size positives, color processing houses (now thats one for the history books!)... some action in those days! Bromides, negatives and client dockets; the in house dark room for urgent bromides and would you believe it, the graffitti in the dark room about the sexiet babe in the agency!!!!
A enduring memory is of a late night night in office with the guys which kind of degenrated into a 2 hour melee with rubber solution. The solution used to thicken instantly and the trip was to make small rubber balls and play with them. They used be become something like the 'crazy balls' that we saw later. The actual function of these balls made of rubber solution used to be to act as an 'eraser' to remove the excess solution prior to 'white painting' the entire typeset artwork! Anyway, i remeber the entire office being shafted by the boss the next day for the mess! How i miss the addicting smell of that rubber solution!!!
Most amazing used to be the guys who used to work in the spray department. The hum of the compressors, the smell of water colours and mostly the pure talent of the guys would just blow me away.
Just awesome. And also i disticntly remember the ad fraternity used to get a heck of a lot more respect than it does today! Amen.

1 comment:

Peregrine said...

So evocative of the goodl days!!! Even from a client perspective, it was purev excitement waiting for the agency people to arrive with the new layouts...!!!! And to actually, physically see them and touch them...