He Changed Our Lives

 

Steve Jobs touched everybody.  All over the world.  But he dramatically changed our advertising industry forever.  The minute we first adopted Macs in the graphic design side of our business, our production techniques were never the same.

 

Because Ellis-Harper is (proudly) located in Auburn, what was a small market, we had to order type for print ads from a typography house.  Either in Birmingham or Montgomery.  The process of determining what type we ordered was ARDUOUS.  We had to manually count the number of characters in a piece of copy. Select the font. From a massive font catalog we’d accumulated. Then calculate the number of number of characters in that font that fit in a line of type, the size of which we had designated in our comp—a rough layout.  

 

Prior to readable  fax machines, we mailed the marked up copy with ALL these specifications to the typography house.  Two days later, Dick Salmon at the SACO station where the Greyhound came in, would call to say “you have a package from Birmingham."  His dialogue never changed in over a decade.

 

Then followed the fitting of type to layouts, pasting on with wax, so type could be repositioned, cutting out duplicate letters to correct typos with really sharp Exactos and re-ordering when something had to change.

 

Enter Steve Jobs’ Macs.

 

We could set the type right here in house!  Holy cow! We could do the layouts on a computer screen.  Lay in the actual type in a layout rather than “greeking” in simulated type for the comp. When my dear advertising friend and former partner, the late Lawrence Bear in Montgomery bought the top of the line Mac, I thought he was crazy.  It wasn’t 30 days before I had followed suit.

 

Advertising would never be the same.  It made us separate the techie Mac artists from the “designy” artists for many years while schools changed their graphics curricula to teach both design and Mac skills.  

 

Where we’ve come since those early days is astonishing. The business model of advertising is totally different because Steve Jobs revolutionized how we accomplish our work.

 

I cried when I heard the news of his death.  Thank you, Steve Jobs, for all you contributed to our world. You’re immortal.