What Creating a Print Ad Was Like Before There Was Photoshop

Before there was any color print, image editing programs or accessible fonts, photo editing was a special form of art done by a small group of professional designers. In honor of Adobe Photoshop‘s 25th anniversary, online company lynda presents a heartwarming and educational video on what it was like creating a print advertisement before the existence of photo editing software. Sean Adams, a professor of graphic design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, leads this tutorial video about the manual labor that was required to make print ads back in the day. Sketches were hand-drawn with a special technical pen called a rapidograph, glued with rubber cement onto paper, and cropped by hand with surgical scalpels or raw razor blades to get that perfect edge. The final mechanical would then be overlaid with instructions about color and typeface before being sent to a third party printer via messenger in a complete process that would take more than 24 hours to complete.