wax paste-ups to websites: 3 decades of desktop design
In those early days, my friends sometimes had computers. For homework, for games. A friend and a cousin had an Olympic gymnastics joystick game I was particularly obsessed with. In 7th grade, we were required to take an old-school typing class (I was never really good at it), but 8th grade meant a Computer Applications course--something entirely new circa 1987. We did small programming and design command-related things, but I don't remember many useful applications of the black and green DOS screen. At least as they would apply to my life and needs in that moment. I preferred thick trashy horror novels to screens by far. School things were turned in handwritten, even the "books" I spent time scribbling as a pre-teen, created in flimsy spiral notebooks. Later, in high school, I would use my aunt's electric typewriter, tucked in her basement under the giant velvet Elvis painting near the bar to type bigger papers on things like Gone With the Wind, the US Response to UFOs, and thorough examination of Shakespeare's female characters.
Things were changing already, however, even just during the couple years I spent on the campus newspaper and yearbook. When I began, we were typing up our layouts on a DOS machine, printing them out, and gluing down layouts and blocks of text with wax on large blue-lined sheets the dimensions, much as newspaper folks had been doing for decades. I remember the faint smell and churn of the wax machine. How you had to maneuver the lines and blocks of text into place. I have clippings of articles I wrote, and in places, there is a slight crookedness, especially when trying to fit just a little more text into a limited space. The headlines were all different sizes depending on what fit where. Paste ups were dying, and by my senior year, there was a larger and formidable Windows machine in the journalism office. The next year's editors (by which time I'd have moved on) were learning how to do layouts in Word Perfect.
In college, I had access to tiny campus computer labs, but mostly relied on the navy blue electric typewriter I'd procured with graduation money, a machine that lasted me four years (though there were still lots of mistakes and much correction tape/fluid involved.) My first real poems (barring the blue diary & pen-pal stationery ones I wrote in high school) were typed on that machine, with its thin, flimsy typing sheets. The final year, there were two computers in the campus lab that had internet connections. By the final semester, I frequented the lab more and more, and was slowly switching to computer-typed assignments and freelance film reviews for the campus paper, Though I still typed a lot of things at home.
The most important thing that happened that last semester is that I found myself in need of a single science/math credit. The shortage was because my freshman-year Oceanography course in North Carolina had only been 3 credits, and with my 4 credit Chemistry class the previous semester, I needed a total of 8 for my bachelors. RC offered small 1 credit computer classes, one of which was desktop publishing using Word Perfect, which now looked much different than years prior in the journalism office. It was a whirlwind of a semester, but my favorite parts were in that tiny basement computer lab working on laying out things like newsletters and tri-fold brochures, and which I was weirdly really good at. Somewhere I even have my portfolio from that semester tucked away, its pages bound in a three-ring under plastic pocket sheets.
It was actually a skill I probably should have doubled down, and may have missed the chance for a proper graphic design career. I also probably should have learned to marshal that knowledge when looking for that first real job after grad school, but hindsight is 20/20. So its 1997, and I go off to grad school in lit at DePaul, where I spend the first semester discovering the wonders of the internet on a much more plugged-in campus. Our first weeks of the program are spent learning how to use databases and the internet for literary research, which blew my mind after having hefted around and paged through thick and bulky MLA indexes in my undergrad library basement for years. Our subject for the research class iwas the Romantics (determined by the teacher who happened to be teaching it that term's area of expertise.) The rest of the time, I spent scrolling list-servs and discussion boards related to poetry--the P&W forums being one of the chief draws. Outside of those hours in the lab, however, much of my creative and real life were predominantly offline. I had swapped my typewriter for a word processor that saved to discs, but I was still researching lit mag guidelines in print and sending paper submissions with their tidy SASEs. Still plodding down to the mailbox each day hopefully.
By the time I finished my MA, the internet was everywhere, even on my desk computer in the elementary libary, where I landed my first job. Admittedly, there wasn't much time to use it in the chaos of one-after-another class visits and books everywhere. While I used it to scope out apartment listings when I eventually landed the job at Columbia, it was still a job I applied for old-school from a newspaper listing in the Chicago Tribune. Once back in Chicago, I was in front of computers for multiple hours, including long and lonely evening shifts with nothing to do but help people check out and work the printer. Thus, the schedule provided some time each day to work on poems and research online journals, springing up more and more despite the print-only snobs. It was my excitement over these journals that led me to starting my own in late 2001. Of course, layouts now demanded you know at least some HTML in addition to desugn acumen. If not extensively, at least enough to tweak a simple template to get what you wanted. Those early webpages, both for wicked alice and my personal website were super basic and not all that interesting. When I started the print press in 2004, I used Word (and still do now out of habit) largely because I could use it on any computer I might be on--multiple machines in the library, and a year later, at home on my laptop. Later, on the studio laptop where I did the bulk of press work.
Laying out the first book, which was actually just a chap of mine, was trial and error. I was using it as a test-run to iron out the kinks, to source supplies, and learn how to do the layout. In the spring semester, I was taking a Small Press Publishing class at Columbia as part of my MFA in 2004 that had some helpful info on putting together a print annual for the lit mag. But many of my fellow classmates were aiming too large, planning to start magazines and book publishing outfits. I was the only one that had multiple copies ready to go by the end of the term and plan to move forward with the press with the first official title in late 2004. Later, I would often run into my professor (a fiction faculty, not poetry) at AWP or on campus and he would marvel DGP was still going. I haven't seen him in years, but he would likely be happy to know, 22 years later, its still hanging in there. The first couple of titles were actually financed by my winning a pretty big local poem contest that spring. I had the first copies ran off at Office Max, with cover stock that was actually watercolor paper form the art store (I later discovered Paper Source.) I just bought an heavy capacity trimmer and a booklet stapler and I was in business. Eventually, I had my own printers at home, and three years later, the studio space that allowed me to spread out and increase the number of releases when I was finally free of MFA program demands.
In those years, I took to layout and design like I'd been doing it forever. In fact, the cover designs were deeply entwined with my early efforts at making art and collages. Advancements in Word and in things like MS Publisher, as well as duplex and booklet printing made things much easier and faster to put a book together. While initially I was creating two column layouts in a figure 8 pattern for manual duplexing, eventually I could just create a pdf from a standard sized document, bump up the font, and print it booklet style. This is still how I do it today unless a book has images or special dimensions. I also eventually discovered that I could outsource covers to save money and printing imperfections on home machines that never gave me the quality I wanted.
And of course, those print design skills came in handy elsewhere. I was able to make graphics and posters for library things and create websites for programs. I could make paper goods to sell in the shop and design online exhibit pages when the pandemic required it. I also used those design skills to layout our winning ACLR application in 2017. Post 2021, it also made figuring out formatting my own books and zines for publication a much simpler endeavor. I also occasionally make some extra money doing designs for others with non-dgp projects.
It feels like such a jump--from those waxy strips of paper on the blue line grid to designing zines electronically. I am set to start reading submissions for the ecogothic anthology this week and choosing work, so that will be a new experience, a longer anthology project that has me excited to learn that process.
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