Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Everyone gets a fair hearing on keithinside.blogspot.com: Kevin Moser

For those of you who may have not read the comments listed underneath yesterday's archive item, I want to make sure that Kevin has a chance to defend himself. Kevin, go ahead:

Hey, Keith. Before you publicly criticize your humble former graphic designer, you should first walk a mile in his computer! (Thank you, Charlotte Frederick, for tipping me off to this blatant disrespect!)

When I inherited the graphic design position at GBS circa 1994, it was with the title "interim" because I had no experience and no training, other than two weeks of crash-course instruction from departing designer Rob Scott.

My computer was an Apple IIci. Let me refresh your memory as to its incredible power and versatility.

Its original price was $8800! Its computing speed was a lightning-fast 25 MHz! It came with a 40 MB hard drive, which we upgraded to the maximum 80 MB! It came with 1 MB of RAM, which we upgraded to 4 or 8 MB!

Now let's remember the awesome software of that day. Jon was correct that Photoshop did not yet have multiple levels of undo. I could only go back ONE action. Not only that, but my version of Photoshop did not even have LAYERS!! All edits were destructive. I had to plan ahead and know exactly what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it. I had to save multiple copies of the project at different stages in its creation in order to be able to go back to a given point and rework it. But I was limited to how many copies I could save because of the 80 MB limit of the hard drive! Practically every project had to be erased before the next one could commence. Don't forget, the only option for saving a file apart from the internal drive was the massive (ha!ha!ha!) 1.4 MB three-and-a-half inch floppy disk!! There were no recordable CD's and certainly no DVD's.

My Microtek scanner could easily take 45 MINUTES to scan a single color picture! We had no internet. iStock photography was not even imagined and we did not have digital cameras. Any art came from a very limited selection of CD's costing hundreds of dollars or from our Dynamic Graphics Clipper files, which were paper copies that had to be scanned!!

I'm looking at that poster (which you described as a "strike out") and wondering how on earth I was ever able to produce it at all! All of those bevels, embosses, and drop shadows had to be created from scratch! They did not exist as an effect you could choose from a menu.

OK, buddy Keith? Got the picture?!! I'd REALLY like to see what YOU would have produced under the circumstances!!

Still your Friend,
(even while smarting with humiliation from your published abuse)

Kevin

P.S. You're right. That poster was awful!

1 comment:

Jon Plank said...

Back when Kevin designed that poster, he walked three miles to work every day in six inches of snow in his bare feet (with barbed wire wrapped around them for traction). Those were the days.